We've been told that thrifting is the antidote to fast fashion's excesses. Buy secondhand, the logic goes, and you're no longer complicit in exploitation and waste. But somewhere between the earnest secondhand shoppers of decades past and today's Depop resellers hawking "vintage" Forever 21, thrifting has morphed from a genuine alternative into a convenient excuse.
The problem isn't secondhand shopping itself, it's how we've weaponized it to justify continued overconsumption. When every purchase comes pre-absolved because it's thrifted, we've relocated our consumption rather than reduced it. Jean Baudrillard argued that we don't consume objects for their use-value but for “sign-value”, what they signify. Consumption is inherently about signs, about differentiating ourselves within a social system. Today's thrifter doesn't just buy a jacket for warmth; they buy the identity of someone who thrifts, someone conscious and countercultural. The thrifted item becomes a sign that says "I'm not like other consumers," even as we consume just as voraciously. The performance of ethical consumption becomes indistinguishable from consumption itself, a simulacrum of resistance that masks continued participation in the very system it claims to reject.
Consider the donation cycle. We buy thrifted clothes with a built-in exit strategy: when we tire of them, we'll donate them back, and someone else can enjoy them. This logic is seductive because it makes one feel good about their overconsumption. But this concept that someone else will find a home for it is an illusion we accept without question. We're moving garments around faster, not making them last longer. The Goodwill bin becomes a psychological laundering system, cleansing us of responsibility for where these clothes actually end up—often in landfills or shipped overseas to flood Global South markets and oceans.
The rise of resale platforms like Depop has crystallized this contradiction. What was once a peer-to-peer exchange has become an arbitrage theater. Resellers descend on thrift stores, clear the racks, and relist items at three to five times the price, slapping "vintage" or "Y2K" on anything polyester and pre-2010. This isn't extending clothing lifecycles; it's creating artificial scarcity and manufactured nostalgia. The same mass-produced items that were designed for obsolescence are now marketed as rare finds.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry illuminates what's happened here. In “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Adorno and Horkheimer argued that capitalism absorbs and neutralizes any opposition to it, turning dissent itself into another product to be sold. The culture industry doesn't censor resistance but indeed commodifies it, packaging rebellion as lifestyle choice. Thrifting promised to opt out of the fashion system, but the system simply absorbed it, transforming anti-consumerist practice into aesthetic commodity. Now we have thrift hauls, thrift influencers, and thrift aesthetics, complete with their own algorithmic feeds and sponsored content. Even our attempt to escape feeds the same hunger for novelty and constant acquisition that fast fashion cultivated. We're not disrupting the system; we're providing it new content.
The real question isn't whether we're buying new or secondhand. It's whether we're extending clothing lifespans or just moving stuff around faster. Are we reducing total consumption, or merely shifting where we consume? A closet churning through hundred thrifted items a year isn't more sustainable than one rotating through fifty new ones, it's just better branded.
This isn't an argument against secondhand shopping. When done thoughtfully, buying used genuinely reduces demand for new production. But we need to stop treating "thrifted" as a magic word that absolves all consumption. Climate change demands actual action, not just redirection. It demands wearing things for a long time, repairing what breaks, and questioning whether we need that item at all, regardless of where it came from.
The thrift store should be the last resort when something genuinely needed can't be borrowed, mended, or done without. Instead, we've turned it into just another place to shop, another site of endless browsing and acquisition. We've mistaken circulation for conservation, and movement for meaning. Until we confront our addiction to consumption we're just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship, convinced we're sailing somewhere better.