Pre-owned, re-used

By Rebecca Willis

It’s the time of year when fashion magazines suddenly put on weight. The women inside are still thin as wire, but the magazines themselves require careful lifting: the 2007 edition of American Vogue that featured in the film "The September Issue" tipped the scales at nearly 5lb, and this year’s model is apparently the second-fattest ever. Published in high summer but focused on autumn, these lucrative editions are swollen with adverts coaxing us to buy—sorry, "invest in"—our winter wardrobes. The accompanying editorial, if you can find it (86% of the "September Issue" issue was advertising), exhorts us to update our look and get shopping. So now feels like the right moment to question all this novelty and consider its opposite: second-hand clothing.

There are many words for second-hand: pre-owned, pre-loved, re-used, recycled. Even vintage, a term that once meant something specific to do with wine and cars. This wealth of euphemisms tells a tale: second-hand clothes have an image problem, even in an era of planet-consciousness. For anyone who grew up in poverty or in wartime, old clothes—cast-offs, hand-me-downs—have unpleasant overtones. Several people I know have an almost pathological resistance to them, citing the smell of mustiness or mothballs, of old age and perhaps death. Their concerns about hygiene are perfectly understandable. Clothing is personal, after all: "second-body" would be a more accurate term than second-hand. But that’s when dry-cleaners come into their own.