Call it what you like – second hand, vintage, pre-owned, pre-loved, thrift – but second hand clothes shopping has been around for a long time. Oxford opened its first charity shop in England in the 1940s, while The Salvation Army says it opened its first charity shop – offering more affordable items like clothes – all the way back in the 1870s.
And there have long been vintage clothes shops too – a more curated version of second-hand shopping than what charity shops offer.
But they have long been relatively niche forms of retail, and often had a bit of a negative association with them. You went to the vintage shops if you were looking for a particular style of clothes – and the stereotype of the kind of person who went to a charity shop tended to be older, and probably poorer too.
It wasn’t where fashionable or well-to-do people went to get kitted out – until recently at least.
When did that change?
It’s hard to narrow it down to an exact moment or event.
The Macklemore song ‘Thrift Shop’ which came out almost 13 years ago could arguably act as a marker to some degree, as that very much played on the trend of people going to charity shops to find cool items for a bargain. But even that was about something that was already happening – so you could easily go back a few years before that to when it all really started.
Perhaps it really stems from the aftermath of the financial crash when people – and particularly younger people, who of course are always the trend setters – were trying to find ways of expressing themselves without breaking the bank.
It’s no coincidence that the second-hand clothing trend is being led by Millennials and Gen Zers – people aged from their teens through to their late 30s, early 40s. One survey suggests that around two thirds of people in those age brackets bought at least one second hand item of clothing in the past year.
We might not know exact when it became a trend – but can we say why?
There are some fairly obvious factors at play in this.
You are looking at a point in time – post financial crisis and then leading through to the current cost of living crisis – when younger people have been squeezed financially. This is the era that also saw the growth of precarious employment and zero hours contracts, for example. But there are some more fundamental ‘fashion’ factors at play here too – it’s not all practical.
Because this is also the era of fast fashion – which has made it accessible for people, even people who might not have a lot of money, to buy a wide variety of items of clothing. And it’s incredibly easy to do that, too – you don’t even need to ‘go’ shopping, you can do it all without getting up from your couch.
But there are a couple of problems with that – because fast fashion clothing tends to look like fast fashion clothing. Of course there are any number of colours and patterns available, and retailers are constantly changing their stock but because of the way the items mass produced, they tend to fit within a certain ‘look’.
And they also often tend to be designed with a certain body shape in mind.
And that ‘mass produced’ element is a problem from a fashion point of view too – because it’s much harder to have a ‘find’ now. Say if you see a favourite celebrity or influencer wearing something you like, it’s very easy to quickly find out exactly what that item is – and where you can buy it. Or, more likely, what online retailer is selling a dupe for a fraction of the price. So then you can have it – but so too can any number of other people.
All that means that, if you’re relying on fast fashion, it’s very hard to stand out, make a statement or show off your style – which is the whole idea of fashion, especially when you’re young and (trying to be) trendy.
But second-hand and vintage clothes shopping is totally different to that.
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Because you have to put time and effort in to digging around a shop – be it a physical one or a digital one. You probably have to have a bit of an eye, and maybe a bit of luck, in order to find something nice. And once you do that, you can be fairly confident that you’re not going to bump into anyone else who’s wearing the exact same thing – nor would they be able to rush out and copy you even if they wanted to.
So by wearing second-hand and vintage items, that you spent time picking and curating, you’re putting forward a totally different story about yourself than would be the case if you’re decked head-to-toe in mass market or fast fashion brands.
Of course another element to this is the fact that younger people are much more environmentally-aware – so buying second hand is a good way of reducing your carbon footprint. Being a bit cynical about it, wearing vintage clothing is at the very least a good way of telling the world that you care about the environment, whether you actually do or not.
And related to that is the quality of the goods in question. One thing people have learned about fast fashion is that it generally translates through to crap quality – the material is cheap, the stitching is flimsy, you might not get more than one or two wears out of it even if you tried.
But older items of clothing – especially ones that are still in good enough nick to be resold in a vintage or charity shop – tend to be much more robust; so you’re far more likely to get your money’s worth out of your purchase.
So how much is the second hand clothes market worth?
It’s hard to put an exact figure on it because of how nebulous the sector is – you have lots of small vintage shops and charity shops around Ireland, and around the world, and some of them are selling lots of different items, including clothes. Then you have online platforms – some that specialise in this kind of trade, like Depop and Vinted – and then others likes Facebook Marketplace and other classifieds sites that might be used for all kinds of buying and selling.
But the best estimates put the value of second hand clothing sales globally last year in the region of $200-250 billion. And that represents a remarkable rise in a very short space of time; in 2022 the market was thought to be worth something like $165 billion. Resale specialist ThredUp predicts it could be worth $350 billion by 2028 if it continues on its current growth trend.
And this is happening at a time when the broader fashion market is seeing far smaller – and in some cases no growth at all.
The result being that we’re expecting to see second hand clothes make up around 10% of total fashion sales this year.
Depop and Vinted – how popular are they now?
Hugely popular and growing rapidly.
Depop says it has somewhere in the region of 35 million users – Vinted’s userbase is somewhere between 65 million and 100 million.
Both have actually been around for a long time – Depop was founded in the UK in 2011, Vinted was founded in Lithuania in 2008 – and they’ve been growing their user base and catalogue of items since then.
But now they represent billions of dollars of sales in second hand and vintage clothing – because they’ve made it quite easy for people to take an item they have but don’t want any more, and – rather than dump or donate it – sell it online instead.
In 2023 Vinted turned a profit for the first time ever – and it grew that profit by 330% to nearly €80m in 2024.
The company is now valued at around €5 billion– and was Lithuania’s first ‘unicorn’, which is a start-up with a valuation of a billion or more.
Things aren’t going quite so well for Depop – it was acquired by Etsy back in 2021 for $1.6 billion but just over a year later Etsy wrote down its valuation by almost $1 billion, suggesting it had significantly over-paid for the site.
And part of that seems to be because Vinted is doing so well – and becoming the dominant force in the online vintage clothes market.
Is this all actually a positive for the environment?
Well there’s a bit of a debate around this – because it’s not as clear-cut as it might seem.
The first thing to say is that it’s absolutely better than fast fashion – so that’s something – but it’s not necessarily as unequivocally good as you might think.
Part of the problem around the Depop and Vinted model is that, while they’re focused on reselling, they are still very much consumption-first. Really the biggest thing someone can do from an environmental point of view is to reduce their consumption altogether.
And what we have seen happen with the likes of Vinted is that people have used them as revenue streams. So while the core idea is that every now and again you sell a piece of clothing you don’t need anymore, what’s actually happening is that people are going out, maybe to charity shops or vintage shops, specifically to find items that they can buy and immediately list at a mark-up on these platforms.
And some have been very successful at that – maybe having it as a side hustle, or in some cases even their main source of income. Which is great for them. But it’s not necessarily great from a sustainability point of view – because it’s still creating demand that maybe wasn’t there before, there’s still a carbon footprint in all of the buying and selling and shipping and so on.
And if consumers in generally are still focused on acquiring new items on a regular basis, rather than trying to get the most out of what they have, then you’re not necessarily cutting off the supply of waste – and ultimately the flow of these products to landfill.
It is better than the alternative – but that’s a low bar… and really people who want to go green should be trying to buy less full stop.
And there’s another unintended consequence here too, isn’t there?
Yes – as hard as it might be for people to believe, anything you make from selling items on the likes of Vinted or Depop is technically income – and so you’re liable to pay tax on it.
So even if you’re just making a few euro from the odd a top or a dress that you don’t have any use for anymore, you should be letting Revenue know about that, and probably handing over some of that to the tax man.
