The secondhand fashion community is growing..

Meet the innovators and pioneers who are building communities outside secondhand fashion's traditional boundaries and find out how they're persuading more of us to choose secondhand first.

Is Fashion’s Future Secondhand?

I worked in the fashion industry for over 30 years as a designer and a creative director before starting my The Elephant in my Wardrobe instagram feed, giving up my job and returning to college to study the MA Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion and I’ve spent the last two years immersed in researching the secondhand market. 

I’ve discovered the secondhand market as a vibrant, creative and rapidly evolving space. Right now, vast amounts of easily accessible secondhand stock, affordable pop-up retail spaces, social commerce opportunities and the positive PR being generated by the exponential revenue growth of resale platforms like ThredUp, Vinted, Depop and The Vestiaire Collective are all combining to provide fertile ground for entrepreneurs, innovators and side hustlers to test and develop new business ideas. 

This is why I think fashion’s future could be secondhand! The idea that 25 percent of all our wardrobes, maybe 50 percent of some of our wardrobes, could be secondhand by 2030 seems feasible to me! But for that to happen, I believe secondhand businesses will need to work together, sharing information about what’s working for them and the challenges they’re facing and supporting each other in creating the kind of multilayered ecosystem that will enable people of all shapes, sizes, ages and genders, across all levels of the market, all around the globe to access preloved fashion in a way that works for them. 

Sharing what we’re learning

And that’s the idea behind a series of panel discussions I’m curating for The Lab E20 as part of their Futures of Fashion programme asking “Is Fashion’s Future Secondhand?” The Lab E20 is committed to fashion that is regenerative by design and we want to create a forum where the secondhand, and circular, communities can come together to co-design a regenerative secondhand future.

We held our first panel discussion last night focusing on the importance of location, connection, collaboration and community in the secondhand fashion world. 

The event sold out and I know lots of people couldn’t get tickets. So in the spirit of sharing what we’re learning I’ve tried to summarise the key messages below.

The panellists  

Georgina Evans, Head of Retail for Crisis, the charity that wants to end homelessness. George and her team are leading the way in reinventing charity retailing as a go to local shopping, and socialising, destination across their 15 stores in London. 

Matt Hanrahan, Co-Founder of Reskinned, an innovative company focused on developing smarter, more effective circular textile systems that extend the worn life of unwanted clothes and collaborating with brands, including Sweaty Betty, Finisterre, Sea Salt and Hush, to run their take-back schemes.  

Paula O’Connor, Co-Founder of The Re-Loved Club, a community fashion resale market based in Walthamstow and born out of a love of secondhand shopping and the community surrounding it. 

Paula Powell, founded Pre-love Emporium Marketplace to bring the community in Chingford together through second hand clothing while raising funds for charity.

Ruth Vout, launched Vout, on Columbia Road in 2020 to reinvent vintage shopping as a luxury designer experience and build a community around slow and circular fashion.

What’s different about shopping secondhand?

The thing that differentiates the secondhand fashion market from mainstream fashion retailing is the sense that secondhand businesses, individual resellers and shoppers all share of being part of a connected community. 

What’s interesting is that while community was important for each of the panellists, they have very different approaches to building their own communities and broadening the appeal of secondhand shopping beyond its traditional boundaries to reach new audiences.

And this is how they’re growing their communities

Build personal relationships

While many mainstream fashion retaiIers are focusing online and closing physical stores, it seems to me that the secondhand businesses, and charities popping up and filing the gaps have an opportunity to reinvent and reinvigorate retailing as an experiential destination. Within this, smaller secondhand businesses could have a particular competitive advantage through the direct personal connections they are able to build with their shoppers.

Vout is a perfect example of this. Ruthie’s curated approach to vintage speaks to a considered consumer who wants to trade up and invest in beautiful quality timeless pieces. And Vout aficionado’s love Ruthie’s aesthetic and actively seek her style advice. Listening to her talk about why a particular Max Mara coat is the perfect investment is mesmerising. But it’s not all hard sell! Once you have the one perfect piece, she’s that trusted friend who’s highly likely to tell you why you don’t need another one.

It’s a concept that has translated successfully to luxury shopping destinations, like Selfridges and Westbourne Grove, converting people who might not have considered shopping preloved before. 

Meet your neighbours

The Re-Loved Club is designed to make it easy for people to clear their wardrobes out, rent rails and spend a Sunday socialising with their neighbours, while selling unwanted clothes in a giant local garage sale. The concept was inspired by Paula’s experiences as the youngest of four sisters who have always shared their clothes - to illustrate this Paula shared a beautiful dress all four sisters had shared and enjoyed wearing for special occasions. What they’ve created is a really fun day out while simultaneously encouraging circular fashion consumption as sellers become shoppers, and vice versa. 

Create a friendly welcoming space

People often describe charity stores as safe and welcoming spaces. Explaining this George described how local communities influence the stock, and the vibe, in each of the Crisis stores. Although this is always under an overarching brand umbrella, their managers have a lot of freedom to create store environments tailored to their individual locations. This could be curating vintage or collaborating with local graffiti artists, being known for playing great music, making great coffee or organising mending workshops - it’s about becoming a go to local destination. 

Likewise, creating an environment that feels welcoming and friendly is at the heart of Paula’s Preloved Marketplace. Where mainstream fashion stores can sometimes feel intimidating, this is a deliberately welcoming space where people can sit down, meet friends, share stories and a cup of tea, support good causes and leave feeling confident about their secondhand fashion choices. 

And collaborate to grow your community

While Reskinned doesn’t have physical stores, building a community is central to their mission to connect more people with circular fashion options. What’s different is that they can do this through the brands they work with, collaborating to promote each individual take-back and resell programme and connecting with new audiences who might not have shopped secondhand before.

The aim is to build awareness amongst brand enthusiasts that their favourite pieces might also be available secondhand. Check out the Finisterre website for a brand doing this in a really inspiring way. 

Things to think about

Values

Values, and the way we value, or don’t value, our unwanted clothes was a common thread running through the conversation. Matt talked about maximising the value of used apparel by getting it to the people who can reuse it best, whether that’s reselling it, donating it to someone who can resell it, upcycling it or recycling it, we need to value our unwanted clothes and do everything we can to keep them out of landfill!

Inclusivity

The secondhand market mirrors or even amplifies the problems and inequalities of the mainstream fashion industry. This could be the massive price hikes on designer vintage items meaning the cost of a preloved Burberry trench has more than doubled in the last four years, or the lack of availability of certain sizes in womenswear.

Panellists discussed lots of creative ways to tackle the sizing issue; from having a seamstress doing alterations at The Re-Loved Club events, to Paula Powell describing how she raided her own wardrobe to make sure she had a good choice of dress sizes. 

Declining quality

George talked about the impact resale platforms like Vinted are having on the quality of donations to charities. Everyone agreed that the quest for ever cheaper clothing in the mainstream fashion market is starting to reduce the quality, and the desirability, of clothes in the secondhand market, and Ruth voiced concerns that declining quality standards mean that more secondhand stock is now damaged and needs to be repaired before being resold. 

Repairs

My MA research revealed that repairs polarise opinions amongst secondhand shoppers, some people love them, some people would mend themselves but not buy something that was already mended, and many people actively avoid anything with faults. George backed this up adding that only some of the Crisis stores are able sell repaired, or repairable, apparel. 

In a future debate we’ll be exploring whether a sustainable secondhand fashion future means we’ll all be wearing more clothes that are patched and darned and whether the growth of fast fashion means the inevitable end of the vintage market. If you’d like to be part of that, please let me know.

Reasons to be optimistic

Everyone agreed that more and more people are discovering secondhand shopping.

Matt Hanrahan shared some of the innovative projects they’re working on around textile to textile recycling which, given less than 1% of all apparel is currently being recycled into new textiles, could be transformational in the future. I was particularly excited to learn that polyester recycling at scale could be a real possibility. 

After the panel finished I felt positively jubilant watching the audience, and the panellists, connecting and discussing opportunities to meet up or collaborate in ways they hadn’t considered before. That was exactly what we wanted to happen.

Huge thanks for Yasmin Jones-Henry, Raeburn Design and the team behind the Lab E20 for hosting, to Reskinned and Circle Collective for supporting the event and to all the panellists, and the audience, for sharing their insights so generously.  

Is fashion’s future going to be secondhand?

The good news is that last night most people thought it could be!

However, I noticed the men in the audience seemed the most sceptical and earlier in the evening panellists had flagged a scarcity of secondhand menswear stock as an issue.

Is that a potential topic for another debate? What do you think?