It’s never too late to learn how to sew your own garments. I started sewing five years ago and am still happily sewing away at age 62. I had a blast sewing my first pair of jeans a few months ago and this fall will source some Japanese denim to make a second pair. There has never been a better time to learn how to sew.
I was coming down here to the comments section to say the same. It's amazing to look at how high-end or couture clothes are constructed and then use those same techniques in my own sewing. Any time I think about buying something ready to wear in high street clothes shop, I'm quickly snapped out of it by one look at some shoddily overlocked inside seams. 😆
You guys have again articulated perfectly something I have been thinking about for a while. I am in the UK and have hit up charity shops (our equivalent of thrift stores) for decades, and it's definitely true that in the last 5-10 years the sauce levels have plummeted. Ten years ago it would be unusual to leave your fave shop empty-handed, but now it happens almost every time I shop. You can still find the occasional gem in wealthy areas (top tip: Fulham Broadway), but even there the rails are *choked* with Primark (the bricks and mortar proto-Shien)... bleak times spyfriends :'(
On your point about Shien though, I never see their things in charity shops presumably because they have disintegrated before getting there???
It seems odd to me that these clothes that are made so cheaply and intended to be disposable still always include extra buttons, sometimes in pretty elaborate little envelopes or plastic baggies. I find it unlikely that the target consumer of these products is going to replace a button that falls off or would even notice if the garment didn't include them. I would think the extra buttons would be the first thing to go and yet against Marie Kondo's advice I have a whole jar of them.
When I was in college (in the olden days of the mid-'90s), the "cool stuff" to thrift was from the '40s through the '60s. That makes me feel incredibly old, but not as old as watching things I remember wearing in the '90s come back into fashion.
I have been smacked in the face with this lately, as I wandered into a local vintage store only to find a Lollapalooza '94 shirt for sale for $200. (I was there! The shirts were not that great!) Last weekend I was at a vintage show with multiple vendors and I was amazed to find that I kept picking up stuff (denim dusters, pleated khakis, that sort of thing) only to find that they were from LL Bean, the Gap, et al. They were absolutely solid, didn't look worn to death, and now I shudder to think what another 20-30 years will bring to the resale market: piles of Lululemon leggings and stacks of Skims loungewear?
Great yarn. I’m in Melbourne, Australia and went to a couple of thrift stores over the weekend. Put it this way, a well-worn, heavily washed and faded Acne shirt was selling for A$190 which is about US$130. It’s insane. 10 years ago I had a banging wardrobe of vintage threads but have since had to go down the route of the Uniqlo U’s of the world to find fresh fits that are within my price point because I’m completely priced out of “vintage” anything.
I have a 90s (if not 80s) Gap striped oxford shirt from when I was about 8 years old and wore clothes that were like 5 sizes too big for me. The oxford cloth is INCREDIBLY heavy, to the point that it feels of better quality than even Kamakura OCBDs that I've bought recently. Granted, there was a gap of ~10+ years when it was in storage and I wasn't wearing it, but the gap (lulz) in quality is STAGGERING and also depressing
I haven't bought an oxford cloth shirt in years because my old (from maybe 2005?) LL Bean ones are still so perfect and the chefs-kiss combo of broken-in while still sturdy. I'm in a tropical climate so they only really get winter wear, but they're better quality than most new ones.
Also want to add: a LOT of the #menswear-era brands that didn't survive are dirt fucking cheap on Grailed and the like. YMMV but McNasty had some bangers back in the day
And yeah those are the kinds of “arbitrage” opportunities I’m talking about when I mention Ervell as an example -- definitely some gems to be found along those lines
Living in Alabama, I haven't seen much jawnflation at all, or maybe only its very early stages. Shein on the thrift store rack still makes me do a double take. Now I know to snap up the still-plentiful 2000s heat while I can...
Immaculate Thoughts as always but for me, this one did skew a little too close to a different kind of cliff face. It totally tracks that even the silver linings of capitalism (like thrifting) are chipped away at. But it's a lot: the notion of poor-quality clothes > conditions even poorer> feeding incomprehensible mass of hamstrung consumers - it's like staring directly into the sun of late capitalism.
But! the mere fact of reading this, peeping the comments and the 'sletters growing audience engenders hope (and hopefully action). Agreed that future thrifting may look different, for sure grimmer - but here perhaps are the inchoate makings of different 'consumers', whose purse and priorities reject what's presently available.
From here, it's all about tactfully preaching the mf gospel 🥲
Very nicely put, I feel with secondhand furniture this has already happened - all (sub-)IKEA-quality everything. Interestingly enough in Germany right now there seems to be a real boom of thrift stores, some of which deal exclusively in vintage garments imported from the US. Lots of Champion, Russell Athletic the likes, albeit it often at higher prices than your typical Goodwill.
To add to the 'harbinger of low-cost landfill' file:
I have, at least three times now, initiated returns of kids' clothes to Amazon or Target (I know, I know) and have been told that I don't actually need to send the item back to get a refund. The latest was for an $18 item.
Do you know how cheaply made something has to be for a publicly traded company to be like "it's literally not worth it for us to bother receiving and re-stocking this item - just keep it or donate it instead."
DEATH AND THRIFTING....A LOVE STORY....When my 98-year-old mother died I went shopping. I bought a new Macbook Air and an iPhone 14 Pro. There were numerous boots in numerous colors of suede and leather, complimenting my new/old favorite 90's red jeans, blue, black, and whatever jeans that I found trolling on websites like Poshmark, ThredUp, and eBay. My closet, overflows like the spillage of a river bank. Unable to unburden itself of old memories that I’d rather forget but can’t seem to let go of even while it continues to grow hungry for more. Like the man eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors, it cries out, feed me!
Rediscoveries allow me to nurture my precious leftovers from the now famously defunct 25th Street Flea and the lesser known at the corner of Grand Street and Broadway. Looking in my closet, I see my style hasn’t changed much. Still stuck in the swinging 60’s.
I've been hearing about the death of thrifting for at least a decade but I am more convinced that it's now finally upon us.
I have a beautiful Roots sweater from the 90s, mostly cotton but with a touch of poly, no pulling, only slight fading, thick, comfy, warm. It's hard to find sweatshirts that feel that thick anymore, even the expensive ones.
Funny you mention t-shirts, it's an ongoing mission of mine to find white t-shirts that aren't transparent. Currently, Colourful Standard is my best bet, but it always feels like I find a brand and then it degrades in quality.
Lastly, it used to be possible to go to thrift stores and every second item was a banger, now it's maybe one per store, if that.
Vintage Muji & Vintage Uniqlo U could be a banger in the future in my opinion. I am surprise that Muji is still underrated though they are producing great quality of garments.
My experience has been that Muji is crazy hard to fit. Even trying the stuff on in-store did nothing; their proportions are weird that shirts just never fit right
Completely agree re: Muji fit, I’m a fitted large but like my tees XL and Muji’s XL fits like a weird medium. But I’d probably snap up some reasonably priced (lol) Uniqlo U for sure
What a potentially prophetic zoom-out on what the timeline of the future industry could hold. What's interesting here is this kind of constant assumption that people are looking for value ("value") when thrifting, in a way that's seeking high-quality, good looks, or something of some kind of authenticity, and that this would continue. So carrying forward the behavior and rules today, nothing of that sort will exist in secondary markets 10-20 years from now. But what changes are to come in the markets of the future???? Do we assume there is some unknowable change? Would a poor quality mass produced shirt of today be appealing in some /other/ form of "value" that doesn't make sense to us just yet? (Just for fun, I mean, what if in the future in 20 years, we are literally all wearing potato sacks? or all clothing is made of a certain plant only? or forever21 is considered high-quality at that point?)
What if thrifting (kind of like high-end furniture antiquing is today, Louis XVII chairs etccc) becomes a cool, rarefied, high-class-only hobby????
Thinking back to say the 20s...imagining that one day, lace Sunday dresses and beaded fringe would be completely obsolete or couture-only because of the effort was probably hard to imagine. but here we are.
No. I think you're right. thrifting as we know it today is....done.
There's a precursor and parallel in the world of vinyl records. They went from being plentiful and unknown (relatively) in the thrifts to sourced and torched in my lifetime.
It’s never too late to learn how to sew your own garments. I started sewing five years ago and am still happily sewing away at age 62. I had a blast sewing my first pair of jeans a few months ago and this fall will source some Japanese denim to make a second pair. There has never been a better time to learn how to sew.
I was coming down here to the comments section to say the same. It's amazing to look at how high-end or couture clothes are constructed and then use those same techniques in my own sewing. Any time I think about buying something ready to wear in high street clothes shop, I'm quickly snapped out of it by one look at some shoddily overlocked inside seams. 😆
Now that I’m sewing, I can never go back to RTW - except the occasional thrifted piece.
Yes !!
Yeaaa! Fellow sewing convert here, feels so good to make something exactly how you want it 🥳
Sure does!
You guys have again articulated perfectly something I have been thinking about for a while. I am in the UK and have hit up charity shops (our equivalent of thrift stores) for decades, and it's definitely true that in the last 5-10 years the sauce levels have plummeted. Ten years ago it would be unusual to leave your fave shop empty-handed, but now it happens almost every time I shop. You can still find the occasional gem in wealthy areas (top tip: Fulham Broadway), but even there the rails are *choked* with Primark (the bricks and mortar proto-Shien)... bleak times spyfriends :'(
On your point about Shien though, I never see their things in charity shops presumably because they have disintegrated before getting there???
Just spitballing but besides disintegration, if the shirt cost $1.50 new, what is the thrift shop going to charge for it? $.15? Not worth it I imagine
Yes I think you’re totally correct
Actually there’s a lot of Shein on Depop (thrifting app)I’ve even thought about buying some of it
It seems odd to me that these clothes that are made so cheaply and intended to be disposable still always include extra buttons, sometimes in pretty elaborate little envelopes or plastic baggies. I find it unlikely that the target consumer of these products is going to replace a button that falls off or would even notice if the garment didn't include them. I would think the extra buttons would be the first thing to go and yet against Marie Kondo's advice I have a whole jar of them.
When I was in college (in the olden days of the mid-'90s), the "cool stuff" to thrift was from the '40s through the '60s. That makes me feel incredibly old, but not as old as watching things I remember wearing in the '90s come back into fashion.
I have been smacked in the face with this lately, as I wandered into a local vintage store only to find a Lollapalooza '94 shirt for sale for $200. (I was there! The shirts were not that great!) Last weekend I was at a vintage show with multiple vendors and I was amazed to find that I kept picking up stuff (denim dusters, pleated khakis, that sort of thing) only to find that they were from LL Bean, the Gap, et al. They were absolutely solid, didn't look worn to death, and now I shudder to think what another 20-30 years will bring to the resale market: piles of Lululemon leggings and stacks of Skims loungewear?
😵💫 a bleak vision !
Great yarn. I’m in Melbourne, Australia and went to a couple of thrift stores over the weekend. Put it this way, a well-worn, heavily washed and faded Acne shirt was selling for A$190 which is about US$130. It’s insane. 10 years ago I had a banging wardrobe of vintage threads but have since had to go down the route of the Uniqlo U’s of the world to find fresh fits that are within my price point because I’m completely priced out of “vintage” anything.
I have a 90s (if not 80s) Gap striped oxford shirt from when I was about 8 years old and wore clothes that were like 5 sizes too big for me. The oxford cloth is INCREDIBLY heavy, to the point that it feels of better quality than even Kamakura OCBDs that I've bought recently. Granted, there was a gap of ~10+ years when it was in storage and I wasn't wearing it, but the gap (lulz) in quality is STAGGERING and also depressing
I haven't bought an oxford cloth shirt in years because my old (from maybe 2005?) LL Bean ones are still so perfect and the chefs-kiss combo of broken-in while still sturdy. I'm in a tropical climate so they only really get winter wear, but they're better quality than most new ones.
Also want to add: a LOT of the #menswear-era brands that didn't survive are dirt fucking cheap on Grailed and the like. YMMV but McNasty had some bangers back in the day
So sick you’ve still got that shirt!
And yeah those are the kinds of “arbitrage” opportunities I’m talking about when I mention Ervell as an example -- definitely some gems to be found along those lines
Living in Alabama, I haven't seen much jawnflation at all, or maybe only its very early stages. Shein on the thrift store rack still makes me do a double take. Now I know to snap up the still-plentiful 2000s heat while I can...
Immaculate Thoughts as always but for me, this one did skew a little too close to a different kind of cliff face. It totally tracks that even the silver linings of capitalism (like thrifting) are chipped away at. But it's a lot: the notion of poor-quality clothes > conditions even poorer> feeding incomprehensible mass of hamstrung consumers - it's like staring directly into the sun of late capitalism.
But! the mere fact of reading this, peeping the comments and the 'sletters growing audience engenders hope (and hopefully action). Agreed that future thrifting may look different, for sure grimmer - but here perhaps are the inchoate makings of different 'consumers', whose purse and priorities reject what's presently available.
From here, it's all about tactfully preaching the mf gospel 🥲
Very nicely put, I feel with secondhand furniture this has already happened - all (sub-)IKEA-quality everything. Interestingly enough in Germany right now there seems to be a real boom of thrift stores, some of which deal exclusively in vintage garments imported from the US. Lots of Champion, Russell Athletic the likes, albeit it often at higher prices than your typical Goodwill.
Barcelona too. Copped the hottest Carhartt-alike I've ever seen while I was over there, in pristine condition
I noticed same phenom in Kyoto! Made me laugh
To add to the 'harbinger of low-cost landfill' file:
I have, at least three times now, initiated returns of kids' clothes to Amazon or Target (I know, I know) and have been told that I don't actually need to send the item back to get a refund. The latest was for an $18 item.
Do you know how cheaply made something has to be for a publicly traded company to be like "it's literally not worth it for us to bother receiving and re-stocking this item - just keep it or donate it instead."
‘Garbaggio’ just officially entered my lexicon 😂
DEATH AND THRIFTING....A LOVE STORY....When my 98-year-old mother died I went shopping. I bought a new Macbook Air and an iPhone 14 Pro. There were numerous boots in numerous colors of suede and leather, complimenting my new/old favorite 90's red jeans, blue, black, and whatever jeans that I found trolling on websites like Poshmark, ThredUp, and eBay. My closet, overflows like the spillage of a river bank. Unable to unburden itself of old memories that I’d rather forget but can’t seem to let go of even while it continues to grow hungry for more. Like the man eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors, it cries out, feed me!
Rediscoveries allow me to nurture my precious leftovers from the now famously defunct 25th Street Flea and the lesser known at the corner of Grand Street and Broadway. Looking in my closet, I see my style hasn’t changed much. Still stuck in the swinging 60’s.
I've been hearing about the death of thrifting for at least a decade but I am more convinced that it's now finally upon us.
I have a beautiful Roots sweater from the 90s, mostly cotton but with a touch of poly, no pulling, only slight fading, thick, comfy, warm. It's hard to find sweatshirts that feel that thick anymore, even the expensive ones.
Funny you mention t-shirts, it's an ongoing mission of mine to find white t-shirts that aren't transparent. Currently, Colourful Standard is my best bet, but it always feels like I find a brand and then it degrades in quality.
Lastly, it used to be possible to go to thrift stores and every second item was a banger, now it's maybe one per store, if that.
Vintage Muji & Vintage Uniqlo U could be a banger in the future in my opinion. I am surprise that Muji is still underrated though they are producing great quality of garments.
My experience has been that Muji is crazy hard to fit. Even trying the stuff on in-store did nothing; their proportions are weird that shirts just never fit right
Completely agree re: Muji fit, I’m a fitted large but like my tees XL and Muji’s XL fits like a weird medium. But I’d probably snap up some reasonably priced (lol) Uniqlo U for sure
I feel like the way they cut those weird fits is supposed to be a feature? V narrow neck hole, giant torso
I think it’s a Japanese style thing
Whoa. Futurism.
What a potentially prophetic zoom-out on what the timeline of the future industry could hold. What's interesting here is this kind of constant assumption that people are looking for value ("value") when thrifting, in a way that's seeking high-quality, good looks, or something of some kind of authenticity, and that this would continue. So carrying forward the behavior and rules today, nothing of that sort will exist in secondary markets 10-20 years from now. But what changes are to come in the markets of the future???? Do we assume there is some unknowable change? Would a poor quality mass produced shirt of today be appealing in some /other/ form of "value" that doesn't make sense to us just yet? (Just for fun, I mean, what if in the future in 20 years, we are literally all wearing potato sacks? or all clothing is made of a certain plant only? or forever21 is considered high-quality at that point?)
What if thrifting (kind of like high-end furniture antiquing is today, Louis XVII chairs etccc) becomes a cool, rarefied, high-class-only hobby????
Thinking back to say the 20s...imagining that one day, lace Sunday dresses and beaded fringe would be completely obsolete or couture-only because of the effort was probably hard to imagine. but here we are.
No. I think you're right. thrifting as we know it today is....done.
true, there will definitely be some currently inconceivable value shifts down the line
There's a precursor and parallel in the world of vinyl records. They went from being plentiful and unknown (relatively) in the thrifts to sourced and torched in my lifetime.