Secondhand clothing product sales are booming - and could help fix the sustainability crisis in the fashion industry

An enormous force is reshaping the style industry: secondhand garments. According to a new article, the U.S. secondhand clothing market is projected to a lot more than triple in benefit in the next a decade - from 28 billion us dollars in 2019 to 80 billion us dollars in 2029 - in a U.S. market currently worth 379 billion dollars. In 2019, secondhand clothes expanded 21 times faster than conventional apparel retail did.

Even more transformative is secondhand clothing’s potential to considerably alter the prominence of quickly fashion - a business design characterized by cheap and disposable clothing that emerged in the early 2000s, epitomized by makes like H&M and Zara. Fast manner grew exponentially over another two decades, drastically altering the style landscape by making more clothing, distributing it more rapidly and encouraging consumers to buy in excess with low prices.

While fast fashion is likely to continue to grow 20 percent within the next 10 years, secondhand fashion is poised to increase 185 percent.

As researchers who study clothing consumption and sustainability, we think the secondhand attire trend gets the potential to reshape the style industry and mitigate the industry’s detrimental environmental effect on the planet.

The secondhand clothing market is composed of two major categories, thrift shops and resale systems. But it’s the latter which has largely fueled the recent boom. Secondhand clothing has long been perceived as worn out and tainted, predominantly sought by discount or treasure hunters. Even so, this perception has evolved, and today many consumers consider secondhand outfits to be of identical and even superior quality to unworn attire. A trend of “fashion flipping” - or buying secondhand clothes and reselling them - in addition has emerged, particularly among young buyers. Because of growing consumer demand and brand-new digital systems like Tradesy and Poshmark that facilitate peer-to-peer exchange of every day clothing, the digital resale industry is quickly becoming another big thing in the style industry.

The marketplace for secondhand luxury goods can be substantial. Retailers like The RealReal or the Vestiaire Collective give a digital industry for authenticated high class consignment, where people trade designer labels such as for example Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès. The market value of the sector reached 2 billion us dollars in 2019. The secondhand apparel trend also is apparently driven by affordability, especially today, during the COVID-19 economic crisis. Consumers have not merely reduced their intake of nonessential items like clothing, but are buying more top quality garments over affordable, disposable attire.

For apparel resellers, the ongoing monetary contraction combined with increased interest in sustainability has verified to become a winning combination.

The fashion industry has long been connected with social and environmental problems, which range from poor treatment of garment personnel to pollution and waste made by clothing production.

Significantly less than 1 percent of materials used to make clothing are currently recycled to make new clothing, a 500 billion dollar total annual loss for the style industry. The textile market produces more carbon emissions than the airline and maritime sectors combined. And approximately 20 percent of drinking water pollution around the world is the consequence of wastewater from the development and finishing of textiles.

Consumers have become more alert to the ecological impact of outfits production and are more often demanding attire businesses expand their commitment to sustainability. Buying secondhand apparel could provide consumers ways to push back against the fast-fashion system.

Buying secondhand clothing escalates the number of owners an item will have, extending its life - a thing that has been drastically shortened in age fast fashion. (Worldwide, in the past 15 years, the common number of that time period a garment is worn before it’s trashed has reduced by 36 percent.)

High-quality clothing traded found in the secondhand market also retains its value as time passes, unlike cheaper fast-fashion products. As a result, investing in a high-quality secondhand garment rather than a new one is theoretically an environmental win. However, many critics argue the secondhand industry actually encourages excess intake by expanding usage of cheap clothing.

Our latest research works with this possibility. We interviewed little American women who regularly employ digital platforms like Poshmark. They saw secondhand clothing as a way to access both cheap things and ones they ordinarily cannot afford. They did not see it as an alternative style of consumption or a way to decrease dependence on new clothing production.

Whatever the consumer motive, increasing the reuse of clothing is a major step toward a fresh normal in the style industry, though its potential to handle sustainability woes continues to be to be seen.

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