F de C doesn’t actually have much in common with a garage sale other than the fact that it is located in a garage and has infrequent opening hours. But this unassuming new addition to Sydney’s second-hand scene is what you might imagine a garage sale to look like if was half Japanese, expertly curated and stocked Comme des Garçons.

Following the no-frills model to a T, F de C’s concrete interior is as shabby as it is intriguing. The store is tucked away behind an art gallery off the main drag of Crown Street, but it isn’t concealed in a way that makes you think the owners purposefully made it GPS-unfriendly just to give an air of exclusivity. There’s an unambiguous yellow sign stuck to a chair out the front, and inside the tiny space is another chair accommodating equally tiny co-owner Ryoko Hori — the brains behind F de C’s impeccable curation.

Hanging on the makeshift racks are clothes by Japanese and European designers that really do make the fashion-as-art cliché a legitimate one. There are pleated crepe skirts by Issey Miyake (who really does, rightfully, refer to his designs as art pieces) plus more everyday-appropriate things from big-name brands like Prada, Dries van Noten and Jil Sander. Towards the back there’s a bookshelf full of interesting-looking texts that you’ll probably want to buy even if you can’t read their Japanese titles, just so you can display them on your own bookshelf. In fact doing so would probably not be out of line with F de C’s concept, which seems to be more about cherishing something for its beauty rather than using/reading/wearing it to pieces. The shop’s name means “End of a Cycle”, a rather poetic take on the age-old “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” idea.

F de C has an online store too, though this where things become slightly difficult to get your head around — “It is in the present-tense and the ongoingness of a modernist moment limping from victory toward a new lo-fi world order. / It has brakes, it has sleeves, and does not use them. / It has a memory and has seen a lot of folk go down. / It has gone down after them.” More than a little enigmatic, but with F de C it somehow makes perfect sense.