The sign looked as though someone had taken the sides of several steel shipping containers, painted them with the brightest hue of red known to man, and hoisted them on the walls of an old factory building. “Village DISCOUNT OUTLET” was plastered in white across the building’s steel paneling, each letter appearing as if it had been stolen from a different restaurant sign.
I stepped inside and was choked by the smell of stale clothing. Racks of old jeans, jackets, shirts, and sweaters lined the walls while other garments lay strewn haphazardly in white bins. Hipster teenagers were scattered across the warehouse-sized building. This was my first time shopping at a major thrift store, and I had no clue what I was doing. But I knew that all of the cool kids were doing it, and I knew that my friend, who had navigated us to her favorite thrifting spot, was eagerly awaiting the hunt for interesting clothing finds.
According to NPR, the thrifting industry, which is currently worth $28 billion, is projected to eclipse the so-called “fast fashion” market by 2029. The industry’s precipitous rise has been largely driven by Generation Z. Refinery29 reports that “an estimated 46% of Gen Z shopped secondhand in 2019, according to Medium, compared to 37% of millennials and just 18% of Gen X.” But what is the allure of shopping for used clothing? And why does it matter?
Clothes are integral to how we perform our identity. They are one of the primary tools we use to influence how people perceive our values and our social status. Think of how suits have been “historically associated with projecting elegance, authority, and mastery of a profession,” or how people buy designer clothes to showcase their wealth. Because clothing is a marker of identity and social standing, fashion is political. Consider how Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) showed up at the Met Gala, a fashion-obsessed display of wealth and excess, wearing a white dress with the words “TAX THE RICH” scrawled in red. Moreover, our clothes reflect our consumption choices — and our values too. The saying “we vote with our dollars” is especially true of fashion. The clothes we purchase set cultural standards for appropriate attire and reinforce the trends from which multi-million dollar clothing stores profit. “These [sartorial] expressions are manifestations of deeper things we’re trying to resolve, both individually and collectively,” said NYU adjunct professor Dicky Yangzsom, who wrote her Yale doctoral dissertation on thrifting. “Thrifting has a great story… and we need stories,” Yangzom said, “It’s an interesting question, what do [these stories] really say about our values? What do they say about what we really believe in?”
My friend led me to the back stairwell of the store and up into the men’s clothing section. I was not sure where to begin, or how, because the store was organized by a logic I couldn’t understand. The underwear was next to the button-ups and jackets, the shoes were next to the t-shirts, and none of it made sense. My friend, seeing my confusion, demonstrated how to thrift “properly”: starting at one overfilled rack and slowly, meticulously, inspecting each garment of interest. I made my way to the t-shirt rack, packed tightly with clothes grouped by color in the sequence of a rainbow, and began sifting through it.
When I finally landed on an article of clothing that spoke to me –– a brown bomber jacket that was in relatively good shape and that did not smell terrible –– it was as if I found my soulmate. The love I felt for that jacket was primal, indescribable, as if that piece of clothing was my firstborn and I was sworn to cherish and protect it. A white tee with “HUMANS AREN’T REAL” printed on it spoke to me in the same way, and then a beige cardigan, and then a knitted sweater. Of the clothes I wear now, these are the ones I love the most and the ones people compliment me on most often. A curious “Where’d you get it?!” usually follows those compliments, and I think that question gets at the core appeal of thrifting: its power as a tool of self-expression.
Individualism and the desire to be unique have always been strong forces in American society, and that is no less true today. Social media platforms, where people build online monuments to themselves, have also heightened the desire to stand out. But the top teen clothing brands of this era –– Urban Outfitters, H&M, Forever 21, and the like –– sell the same kinds of clothing: an overpriced, watered-down appropriation of streetwear. “When I go into regular stores, it feels very commodified and oversaturated because there are so many of the exact same, perfectly-curated item,” Lewis-Hayre told The Politic. Thrift stores, on the other hand, represent a quirky hodgepodge of varying tastes, where you can find an outfit that represents your interests. Jessie Chung ’24 echoed this sentiment. “I really like that there’s an unknown story behind each piece,” she said. “[It’s] also cool to find unique pieces that are not necessarily ‘in style.’”
At Village Discount, I found a faded brown shirt with a picture of Nintendo’s Mario outfitted in a 1930s New York mafia gangster suit. The store had dozens of equally obscure and idiosyncratic pieces of clothing. To young people searching for their identity, thrifting is an opportunity to explore their interests and find clothes that represent who they are. Large fashion brands, constrained by the profit incentive to follow mass trends, simply cannot match thrifting’s appeal. That is likely why online thrifting platforms like Depop and Etsy have seen massive booms in popularity and now compete with big brands for Gen Z customers.
After the high of buying new clothes, a bad case of buyer’s remorse quickly follows. But as I left the thrift store with new old clothes in a garbage bag, my usual guilt was replaced by pride — and maybe moral superiority too. Not only had I saved a good amount of money, but I had also avoided contributing to the incredible waste and pollution generated by the fashion industry. I was an activist in my own little way. Many Gen Zers feel the same. Maya Lewis-Hayre ’24 said she enjoys thrifting because “I can get good quality affordable clothing without worrying about my impact on the environment.” According to a Depop customer survey, 75 percent of respondents said they bought from the second-hand clothing platform to reduce consumption. And according to a 2019 State of Fashion report conducted by McKinsey & Company, young consumers are increasingly making sustainability a priority in their shopping habits. Nita Qiu ’24 said, “Thrifting makes me feel like I’m giving items a second life and using it to its full potential.” Though it provides an activist aesthetic, thrifting has its fair share of problems.
In the early 20th century, thrift stores began cropping up as charitable efforts led by Christian organizations like Goodwill and the Salvation Army. These organizations aimed to give poor people access to newer, high-quality fashion. But, as UNC-Wilmington professor Jennifer Le Zotte notes, thrifting became a justification for increased consumption — and thus more waste and quicker fashion cycles — as middle- and upper-class consumers justify their excessive spending by donating old clothes to charity. As the popularity of thrift stores grew, they began to restructure their business model and store layout to be more similar to retail stores. Organizations like Goodwill and Salvation Army started sending out delivery trucks to collect clothes by the thousands and charged more for higher-quality items. In that way, thrifting has always been intertwined with the profit incentive of capitalism, and the excesses that incentive creates. Today that manifests in retail arbitrage, where wealthy young people buy clothes from thrift stores for cheap and sell them at outrageously marked-up prices on online stores. Those people use the cover of climate awareness to turn a profit, and in doing so undermine any social impact thrifting might have.
So is thrifting any better than fast fashion? Or is it more about virtue-signaling? Eighty to ninety percent of thrift store donations are sold to recyclers, and because textiles are notoriously difficult to recycle, those donations end up in landfills more often than not. Nevertheless, the benefits of thrifting represent some improvement over mindless overconsumption, even if not to the extent many hope.
At the same time, thrifting gives people the illusion of doing good and of being in control of problems that our everyday choices cannot solve: capitalist greed and climate change. That illusion is especially powerful for our generation. An unending succession of world catastrophes has shaped our lives, and technology has let us helplessly bear witness to every one of them. We grew up in the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Drugs, lived through two devastating economic crashes, watched an anti-democratic demagogue ascend to the presidency, experienced a revival of the civil rights movement through Black Lives Matter, and entered adulthood amidst a near two-year pandemic, all while contending with the looming threat of climate change. We spent our childhoods watching our world descend into chaos, and now as we begin to recognize our political and economic power, we have an urge to make change, or at least to feel like we are. Like posting social justice infographics on Instagram or making modest donations to progressive organizations, thrifting allows us to sidestep collective action by satisfying that urge. “There is so much waste just in the average American household in clothing so I just want to do the little I can to reduce that,” Qiu said. The recent rise of thrifting is probably best framed as a reflection of young Americans’ values. It displays the staying power of individualism in our country, as the desire to be unique passes from one generation to the next. It also reveals the collective political anxiety that animates our generation’s consciousness. It lays bare our generation’s desire for a society not beset by world-altering political crises, free from the threat of climate disaster and capitalist exploitation. In the coming decades, our generation will enter the corridors of power, and for better or worse, we will transform our nation’s social, political, and economic landscape. While thrifting allows us to fashion our identities, fashioning a better world will require far more than just buying used clothes.