Shopping second-hand used to be imbued with stigma, signifying a lack of wealth, yet nowadays, the vintage shopping industry has seen a real resurgence, with a report commissioned by ThredUP stating two in five items in Gen Z’s closet are pre-owned. They go on to further predict that by 2027, the value of the second-hand fashion market would double to the equivalent to £2.76bn.
Becky herself, owner of Durham’s own Quirkshop UK, ‘fell in love with vintage clothes at the age of 22’ when visiting Afflecks Palace in Manchester. With a background in ‘economics and commercial retailing’, Becky went into fashion with a politically-active mindset, wanting to ‘understand how society can be better, how we can afford to do that within, or without, a capitalist system.’
Yet sadly we still have a long way to go.
Despite the growth of popularity of online second-hand retailers, from platforms like Vinted and Depop, it’s difficult, as the BBC reports, ‘to find pre-owned clothing businesses that actually turn a profit.’ Depop, for instance, reported a loss of £59m in 2023. As Becky displayed in her own experience of spending sixteen-years selling her clothes online before transitioning into bricks-and-mortar retailing, eBay was ‘a fantastic platform for finding really quirky, really individual stuff’ but now ‘there are many different manifestations of eBay’ where ‘it has become a platform for companies like coast to sell their end of season line, and it is not really for individual sellers, whether they be personal for business.’ Despite ‘turning over quite a bit of money’ she stressed, ‘eBay was making more money out of my 18 hours a day of hard work than I was.’
Ultimately, as Becky underlined:
‘I will always maintain that those online platforms are buyers-markets, not sellers-markets.’
With the rise of ultra-fast, ultra-cheap clothing produced and shipped globally, consumers are encouraged to adopt a disposable outlook of their pieces, offloading more of it after just a few wears to charity shops. This has resulted in ‘second-hand fashion’, as Alden Wicker writes, to be ‘subsidised by the sale of new clothing.’ This new clothing being poorly made, disintegrating garments that are priced higher than when they were originally listed as a recent investigation by The Telegraph showed, where they cited an incident when a used Primark jumper was priced higher than a new one, prompting the author to call the second-hand shopping market in the UK a ‘right rip-off.’ As the prices of products rise, lower income individuals, who these shops were originally intended for, have restored to shop at fast-fashion brands where, as Ellie Pendry identifies, ‘charity shops have become the stage for modern fashion gentrification.’ Shelly Steward identifies, in her article Thrift Store Consumption as Cultural Capital, that the gentrification of buying second-hand has given rise to the ‘creativists’ customer who ‘have fewer financial limitations and go to thrift stores in search of unique pieces.’ This within itself is not problematic: it’s beneficial for the environment for us to repurpose pre-loved clothes in order to cut down our accumulated waste. What’s problematic however is that ‘creativists’ are prone to shop second-hand as they do with fast-fashion where rather than loving fashion they love consumption, prompting the popular genre of huge charity shop hauls, mirroring that of Temu and Shein, costing up to several hundreds of pounds.
As Becky herself has observed in her experience of implanting ‘retail acumen’ in several charity shops in the affluent areas of South London and the North East, ‘charities are certainly struggling for decent stock.’ These shops, she highlights, are run by ‘good people, doing good things, but not understanding the business side of charity retailing.’ As Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of The Or Foundation collaborates, ‘There’s an oversupply of clothes, and it’s lowering the perceived value, and the real value, of everything.’
She elaborates that:
‘We treat waste as if it is a free resource. Sure, you might give it away for free, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort and labour and skill to try to re-commodify that thing that you gave away.’
In the face of the disposable culture of fashion, Becky insists on the environmental and ethical imperative of the vintage-clothing market. She states ‘I like to think of all my business as being a virtuous circle’ where she works to support local Durham charities by ‘giving them stock that I haven’t sold.’
Photo taken by Abigail Hughes
So, what can we do then as students wishing to build our own vintage sustainable wardrobe but not wanting to infringe on that virtuous circle? Becky advises: ‘my best advice for buying in this market is buying something that you love, buy something that speaks to you, doesn’t matter if it is fashionable, it doesn’t matter when it was made, if it speaks to you, get it, enjoy it, and then sell it on. It’s very easy to sell on these days. Or swap, or give to a friend, or something.’
‘The important thing’, she stresses, ‘is that we are not buying online, buying a piece of absolute rubbish, that has been made by a child, slave labour, that’s damaging the climate, and then you wear it a couple of times and then you throw it away. It’s a sin, it is a crime. You’ll harm the planet if you keep doing that.’
Despite the dystopian present of the fashion industry, where it is quite easy as Becky notes to feel ‘depressed about the future’, she ended the interview expressing, ‘I would love Durham city to be known as a vintage destination.’ I would for that to come into fruition, not just to build your wardrobes and communities, but to tackle the climate crisis, as she notes, ‘one garment at a time.’
Want to check out Quirkshop UK for yourself? Go to stalls 40, 41 and 42 in Durham’s Market, and follow her Instagram @quirkshopuk, to buy quality hand-picked pieces for every budget, size and style.