Sarah Jessica Parker Is a Fan of Thrift Shops

— -- Before Sarah Jessica Parker became a fashion icon able to ring up any designer, the star looked for style inspiration closer to home.

As an actress just starting out, she was influenced by "street imagery and girls on the subway more than anything," she told the January issue of InStyle. "I was like, 'How can I do that? How can I afford to do that? What’s my version of that?’"

Without a lot of money, Parker shopped where she could afford.

"Honestly, thrift stores played such a huge part in my life before 'Sex and the City,'" she said. "And, of course, my mom was the biggest influence. She had pretty firm ideas about how we would dress."

Since then, her style has evolved but she still doesn't buy much.

"I dress based on what I have. I’m not a huge shopper, but I love beautiful things," she said. "To be able to borrow them is ridiculously fortunate, and I enjoy every second of that. I have a pretty standard wardrobe, though I’ve got wonderful shoes. That’s more so the case now. I genuinely don’t know what people think of me or want from me."

And when it come to social media, she'd rather not know what the Twitter-sphere thinks of her.

"I don’t have the constitution for Twitter. It’s a boneyard, a feast of vitriol," said Parker, who deleted her account. "I just don’t want to participate in it. But on Instagram people tend to be more civilized. And they can disagree and have objections, but I don’t find it as mean-spirited a community."

Parker currently stars in the HBO series "Divorce," in which she plays Frances, a mother of two who begins to reassess her life and her strained relationship with her husband, played by Thomas Haden Church.

"It’s taken me a long time to find anybody who I thought had as much potential as [Sex and the City’s] Carrie Bradshaw, who was as complicated, human, layered, and objectionable yet understandable, relatable yet foreign," Parker told InStyle. "People think she was a second skin for me, but she wasn’t. I didn’t know her at first. She was different from me as anybody I’d ever played or known. So I feel like Frances is equally as interesting and unknown to me."