Arts & Fashion
The new fashion
Fast fashion could be left on the peg as preloved and repair displace new sales.
1 March 2025
This article first appeared in our World Environment Day 2025 issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Do you see secondhand clothes everywhere?
With charity shops taking over our deserted high streets, vintage (or Vinted) sellers taking over Instagram and the big resale platforms taking over our advertising, the spotlight is firmly on the secondhand market.
This enthusiasm for preloved fashion is being fuelled by a seductive narrative that shopping secondhand is a sustainable thing to do, and suggesting that reselling our unwanted stuff is a good way to make money.
Global secondhand sales are predicted to more than double this decade – so isn’t that a good thing for people and the planet?
It’s true that for us, as individual consumers, choosing to buy secondhand apparel instead of new does reduce our personal carbon footprint.
Yet the reality is that all our secondhand purchases would need to start displacing new purchases – and reducing the billions of new apparel items being manufactured every year – in order for the secondhand market to start driving down the fashion industry’s overall emissions.
Displacement matters because, according to McKinsey & Company, the vast majority of fashion’s emissions happen during the production of fibres, fabrics and new garments.
Most sustainability champions agree that making fewer new clothes – and wearing existing clothes for longer – are the most effective ways to reduce the fashion industry’s environmental impact.
But the elephant in the room is captured in the Re/make Fashion Accountability Report 2022: ‘despite the meteoric rise of resale, none of the companies that we evaluated that have resale programmes in place demonstrated that they are, in tandem, reducing the production of new products.’
In fact, research suggests that the ability to dispose of our clothes in relatively easy and guilt-free ways – donating to charities or reselling online – could actually be increasing new apparel sales.
Paradoxically the growing secondhand market could be triggering a circular economy rebound effect by encouraging us to churn our wardrobes more often to make space to buy more new stuff.
Secondhand enthusiasts I’ve spoken to are worried about the impact that declining quality and increased discounting in the mainstream fashion industry will have on the secondhand market’s future.
Many secondhand retailers, and some charities, say they can’t or won’t resell fast fashion items.
This matters because, at the time of writing, there are 95.2 million items tagged Zara, 86.6 million items tagged H&M, 31 million items tagged Primark and 29.5 million items tagged Shein – on Vinted alone.
Research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation suggests the lifetime emissions of a new dress are halved if it is worn 20 times by its original owner and then resold and reworn a further 40 times.
But how many of the millions of fast fashion items flooding the secondhand market will find a new owner, or displace a new purchase?
The sad reality is that most of our unwanted clothes won’t find a happy new home in someone else’s wardrobe.
In the UK 49% of the clothes we dispose of end up being binned and landfilled or incinerated.
Sadly, less than 1% of all our old clothes will be recycled into new clothes.
Of the apparel we donate to charities, less than a third will be resold here; globally, the UK is the second-largest exporter of used clothing.
Taking our old clothes back to brands is not a better option, either.
A 2023 Changing Markets Foundation report revealed only five of the 21
garments they returned to retailer take-back schemes were resold on the same continent.
Landfill doesn’t have to be the inevitable fate of our old clothes; the secondhand market could be a cornucopia of preloved treasure – but its future is in our hands.
The same new clothes we choose to buy today will be filling charity shops and resale platforms in the future.
What if we stopped buying throwaway fashion and started buying the clothes we’d really like to find in a vintage market in 25 years’ time?
Fast fashion could be left on the peg as preloved and repair displace new sales.
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New report on labour rights in Pakistan exposes gross failings in the global fashion industry.
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