Why secondhand first

Beyond the obvious

To start, what is the obvious? I suppose the most on-the-nose, obvious reason that people would assume someone would choose secondhand first is frugality, and that is where started for me. Even as a teenager I longed for amazing clothes, and I was unwilling to go the Forever 21/H&M route, because I knew the ethical implications were just not what I could handle, and also because, candidly, I just generally have no interest in cheap knock-offs as a category.

Starting in middle school, my friends and I would comb through the racks at Plato’s Closet together. And when I got my driver’s license, I started seeking out nice thrift shops in my city and experimenting with typing search terms into eBay, pulling brand names from magazines and Sex and the City and stores I’d discovered when traveling to LA and NYC.

Even then, I found the process of the hunt satisfying and exciting on its own, the game of chance adding a level of intrigue to the process. The thrill of finding something I couldn’t have planned on, at a price I could actually afford as a seventeen-year-old who bussed tables for gas money, felt fated. I actually wrote my college admissions essay as an extended metaphor comparing a pair of thrifted jeans I’d found— a perfect fit— to my feelings about Indiana University.

Then when I moved to New York City when I was 21, I lived first at West 12th Street and 6th Avenue, and within my first week of living there, I discovered that I lived a mere four blocks from the NYU-adjacent Goodwill. Sadly, that location has now closed, but for a solid decade, I returned to that store over and over again, buying jeans and tops and skirts and dresses. Then I started finding stuff for my mom or my friends and grabbing that, too.

And over those same years, of course, online consignment shopping got better and better— but that’s a different essay.

One of countless entirely thrifted outfits.

The next perhaps “obvious” reason for shopping #secondhandfirst…