Fran Drescher Partners with thredUP for 'Unique and Bohemian' Upcycled Holiday Collection

Courtesy thredUP

The flashy girl from Flushing is all about sustainability.

Fran Drescher, who calls herself an environmentalist and a "person of word and deed," teamed up with thredUP for the holiday season to launch an eco-friendly upcycled holiday collection. Designed by Zero Waste Daniel, the collection marries two things Drescher cares deeply about: fashion and the environment.

"thredUP is such a big resale clothing site, and I'm just really proud to be part of the holiday collection," Drescher, 65, tells PEOPLE exclusively. "The holiday collection is fun, and it's unique and bohemian, which is nice. It's original. It's representational of where we need to be heading."

The trash-to-treasure collection, called Full Circle and available starting Nov. 15, includes everything from pet beds to bucket hats. The collection also includes a few one-of-a-kind clothing pieces, including a patchwork coat that the Nanny star modeled, fell in love with and kept.

"It looks like it's a big patchwork fur coat, but it doesn't have any real fur on it, obviously," she says of one of her favorite pieces in the holiday collection, which she modeled for the photos taken at her California home. "I had a lot of fun with that, and I was really thrilled that they let me keep it, because I look forward to wearing it through the winter months. If I walk through the streets of New York with that coat, I'll get a lot of heads turning."

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Courtesy thredUP

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Everything in the collection is made with scraps that would have otherwise been unusable on thredUP, giving it all a new life. Inspired by Drescher's own fashion on her iconic TV show The Nanny, the bespoke pieces, like the patchwork coat, are true treasures to share during the holidays. But thredUP is also offering more budget-friendly buys that start at just $10. Plus, 20% of the proceeds from the collection will go directly to Drescher's charity Cancer Schmancer.

Though Drescher candidly shares that she has to sometimes remind people that she's not Fran Fine from The Nanny, she does share a love of clothes like her character. And while she loves luxurious things like cashmere, she's happy to find these pieces while thrifting — like she's been doing her whole life.

"I had an older sister, so I almost never got anything new," she tells PEOPLE of her childhood. "It was all hand-me-downs, and it was fine. I couldn't wait to get it. And when I was first living on my own back then, I had to go to the thrift stores — that's where I shopped almost exclusively."

Now Drescher sources her clothes from a variety of places, often with the help of Brenda Cooper, who helmed the costumes on The Nanny but has also worked with the actress on other projects, including the thredUP campaign. Drescher says that over the years, Cooper has taught her how to wear the right colors for your skin tone, telling PEOPLE that Cooper calls her a "dark Autumn."

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Courtesy thredUP

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"When I find the perfect winter white that's not really white white at all, she's orgasmic, she's so happy," Drescher says with a laugh of the colors she gravitates toward. And while she admits she once wore a lot of black — as to be expected from a native New Yorker — she now finds joy in colors, as well as clothes that make her feel "sexy and powerful."

"I like things that show the shape of my body," she says. "I don't like boxy things. It's important to me to show my waist because I have an hourglass figure."

But perhaps one of the best fashion lessons she's learned from Cooper that she still carries around with her is that your outfit starts from the inside out — and that means undergarments.

"I never really thought about how important undergarments were, and how essential it is to get the right undergarments so you don't see lines and so they're not digging in," Drescher says. "I'm not going to kill myself with the undergarments, even if it's something like Spanx — it can't be that I can't breathe."

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Courtesy thredUP

For people who look to Drescher — and Fran Fine — for fashion inspiration, the actress and activist is pleased to know that things she wore in the '90s are in trend again. She's also quick to admit that she's "lived long enough" now to see the way trends come back into style after a few decades.

"It seems like it's like a 20- or 30-year cycle that it sort of comes around again," she says of fashion. "I'm really thrilled that The Nanny fashion is also coming around again in a very big way. It was, I think, very ahead of its time then."

Drescher credits Cooper and the show's creator and executive producer Peter Marc Jacobson for "fashioning the show" in such a forward-thinking way — down to the grand staircase at the Sheffield house that allowed for Fran to make an entrance in her many outfits.

"I mean, even to this day, there's ne'er a place you can think of where The Nanny doesn't still air, so it's quite a phenomenon," she says, adding that the millennials who watched the show in the 1990s but couldn't fully take part in the fashion at the time (because they were too young) are an integral part of giving it new life today.

"Those millennials really fueled a new kind of fandom on social media where they connected with each other," she says. "Now they're older, they have kids, they're introducing the show to their kids and they're really appreciating what that fashion was."