Sustainability// How Lockdown Life Changed my Thrifting Habits.
By Chloe de Lullington
12 December 2020
A huge part of my overall lifestyle is charity shopping; always has been, always will be. As I explained in my first piece for HHS, Vintage Vs Fast Fashion: The Feminist Stakes, sustainability and thriftiness are two of my top considerations. Traditionally, this has been a physical experience – I like nothing better than pottering from charity shop to charity shop, running eager fingers over soft fabrics and shamelessly sniffing the armpit section. (It’s not gross – you have to know what you’re buying!) The thrill of a £1 pair of dungarees, for instance, never gets old.
The last time I was in one of my beloved charity shops, however, was March 14th. Since then, it’s been the WFH lifestyle – comfy trousers, slouchy tops, a bra if you’re lucky and I happen to have a video call that day. That’s not to say I stopped thrifting, though; my comfiest pair of bottoms are actually stretchy, faded mom jeans picked up for a couple of quid, and the rest of the time you can find me in my enormous thrifted dungarees so spacious and formless that when I walk into a room wearing them my boyfriend announces my arrival like a YouTube video title: “Little Monkey Wears Dungarees!!!! One Million Views!!!!”
My thrifting during lockdowns 1 and 2, however, has evolved. I love the randomness of browsing secondhand shops, but being stuck at home has made me a more discerning thrifter. I can happily spend literal hours putting keywords into eBay and filtering by Vintage, Price Low to High – as I write this, I’m wearing a glorious pink ribbed cardigan yielded up by one such search – and the reduced sense of urgency is wonderful. With physical charity shops, you basically need to make snap decisions and snaffle the bargains before someone else does, and while there’s nothing wrong with this, I am trying to be more mindful, and I find digital thrifting easier to pursue mindfully.
I’ve also ventured back onto Depop after making my first and only purchase on there around six years ago (it was a vest top featuring a hedgehog wearing a deerstalker – don’t ask). I follow several genuinely fantastic vintage sellers on Instagram, and buying from their Depop pages is a guarantee of quality. It means I can shop small, boost independent business, and stay sustainable in all the ways. Additionally, many traditional charity shops now also list their items online – White Rose is a great place to start.
This brings me on to another point regarding sustainability and lockdown: fast fashion. The big boys are panicking; with high streets crippled, the big brands are in a bit of a state. I’m not gloating about this at all, because as ever it’s the people at the bottom of the food chain who suffer. At time of writing, I’ve just heard that the Arcadia group, owned by real life Disney villain Sir Philip Green, is “on the brink of collapse” with administrators possibly being appointed and, of course, jobs being lost – 13,000 of them. Sir Phil isn’t personally worried, of course he’s not; he’s got his £100 million superyacht (yes, that is the right number of zeroes) and he’ll be just fine – but think of the 13,000 people who very much won’t be.
Similarly, when we look at the online brands, PrettyLittleThing and Boohoo boss Umar Kamani is worth £1 billion, but the workers making the clothes he sells are reportedly on £3.50 per hour in exploitative warehouses right here in the UK, in Leicester. Over Black Friday, that hideous commercial holiday of grossly inflated prices fattened like turkeys only to be publicly slashed in much the same manner, I saw a tweet from a delighted fast fashion devotee. “Just ordered over £600 worth of clothes of [sic] PLT for £6, what is happening, @UmarKamani @OfficialPLT I love uuuuu” she wrote, and my heart sank as my blood boiled. With the best will in the world, how can someone be so stupid as to see those figures and not realise that someone, somewhere, is paying a terrible, terrible price for your (terrible, terrible) cheap clobber? “What is happening?” – well, it’s called modern slavery, hun.
I get it – the thrill of a bargain is exhilarating (see: my £1 dungarees from the start of this piece), especially in a time when there is arguably little else to get excited about. But for the love of your fellow humans, please stop and consider the people behind these insane prices, and then have a little look on eBay before giving your hard-earned cash to the Greens and Kamanis of this world. They absolutely do not need it, but small businesses do. Chase that thrill the ethical way: go secondhand.
On that note, I’d like to end on a positive, with a practical tip inspired by a fellow thrifter on Instagram. Whether you’re looking to start your sustainable journey or a seasoned secondhand pro, consider thrifted dupes. Spotted something from this season on Topshop or PLT that you really want? No shame in that – fashions change and it’s natural to want to look good. But have a search on eBay (the items tend to be cheaper than Depop, although you can also try there), describe the item you’re after and scroll through. The thing with fashion is it’s inherently cyclical; reinvention is, realistically, nothing more than rebranding at the altar of retro, and whatever you’re after, there’s likely to be an existing version of it available secondhand. I guarantee you’ll save a pretty penny, and when your thrifted dupe turns up (in recyclable packaging, if you’re lucky!) you can look, and feel, damn good.
Chloe de Lullington is a writer and lifelong thrifter, interested in the repurposing of clothes and culture in contemporary life. Originally from Kent, she gained a First Class degree in English Literature and Film and Theatre from the University of Reading and now lives in Shropshire.