Thrifting promised an alternative to fast fashion. It became another market.

It used to be simple. You walked into a secondhand shop, found a jacket for next to nothing, walked out happy. Nobody knew what you were looking for. Nobody was competing with you.

Now that same shop has marker-written prices, clothes sorted by colour, and a queue at the door on weekends.

What happened?

The easy answer is TikTok. #ThriftWithMe has millions of views, influencers discovered that vintage content performs, and suddenly everyone is thrifting. Demand exploded. Prices followed.

But it’s more complicated than that.

The problem isn’t that more people are buying secondhand.

That’s actually good. Less fast fashion, less new consumption in theory, a win for the environment. The problem is what happened to the logic behind thrifting.

Buying vintage used to be an act of patience. You found something special because you spent time, not money. Now resellers do that for you and charge you for the effort. Large warehouses buy tonnes of clothes from poorer countries, curate them, and resell with a 500% markup.

Thrifting has been industrialised.

And once industrialised, it lost exactly what made it special accessibility. Secondhand clothes are no longer for people with small budgets. They’re for people with the time and money to navigate an increasingly competitive market.

Vinted promised something different.

A peer-to-peer market, no middlemen, people selling directly to each other. It worked, until it got too big. Now Vinted has professional resellers, inflated prices, and a marketplace logic that looks suspiciously like what it was supposed to replace.

The irony is that fast fashion has started imitating vintage aesthetics. Zara makes clothes that look “worn in”. H&M launches “retro” collections. The circle closes.

So what do we do?

Maybe the answer isn’t to give up on secondhand. It’s to be more deliberate about where we buy and why. Local shops, swaps between friends, smaller peer-to-peer platforms these haven’t been co-opted by the industry yet.

For now.