Everything is for Everyone: How Secondhand Shopping is Challenging Gendered Fashion
Written by Charlie Elizabeth Culverhouse
Secondhand shopping can liberate in many ways; providing an affordable, accessible way to express unbridled individual style unconstrained by place, decade or season. The search for unique, one-of-a-kind pieces is a major driving force bringing young shoppers into the, albeit musky smelling, dreamscape of thrift stores, vintage treasure troves and, of course, the online world of secondhand shopping. A study by Depop found that, driven by the idea of having individual style, 55% of people buy secondhand to score rare and distinctive pieces that no one else is wearing. But taking the ticket, they also found that 75% buy secondhand to reduce consumption and lessen their environmental impact.
By now, unless you’ve enacted all of your self-restraint and managed to avoid the internet for the past several years, we all understand the beautiful benefits of shopping secondhand intimately. This is reflected in the figures with participation in secondhand shopping growing rapidly, 11 times faster than traditional retail to be exact. The growth is so rapid that the secondhand market is predicted to be worth $84 billion by 2030 - that’s 2X bigger than the expected worth of the fast fashion market.
While it’s been dazzling us with low-priced bargains, seducing us with sustainability, and leaving us clad in sequins, glitter and gold, secondhand shopping has also been championing something that often goes overlooked in mainstream fashion, and most of us didn’t notice it in the thrift stores either. Though it may have so far gone under the radar, secondhand shopping has consistently been quietly championing gender fluid fashion by offering safe, accessible spaces, organised outside of the gender binary, so people can find clothes they love and feel confident in.
Clothing has only recently come to be split across gender lines, with it long before being divided by socioeconomic ones instead. But for the short time that gendered fashion has reigned supreme, so has the counter-concept of gender fluid fashion been fighting it. The only thing that has varied is the degree of representation of gender fluid fashion, not the number of gender non-conforming people across cultures and eras - they have always existed.
The concept of gender fluid fashion is a simple one. Clothing is designed to be beautiful, or useful, or shocking, and it is designed for this only. Any style, colour, print, pattern, fit or fabric, is chosen for the designer’s love of it, or surplus of it, and the end product is marketed to people - not to a specific person, or group of people, but everyone. Everything is for everyone.
Simply, clothes that are not designed with the gender binary in mind and are not marketed towards any specific gender are gender fluid. The concept has gained traction thanks to the shift in norms and the subsequent growing societal understanding of non-binary genders though, of course, there is still some way to go. But propelling the journey is the fact that more and more people of all genders are, consciously or not, challenging the traditional concepts usually assigned to those genders in favour of personal preference and expression.
And there is no better place to find items that display that individual taste than in second hand stores. In these stores, clothes are often organised not by the exclusionary titles of ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ but by fabric, colour, style or decade. Dressing rooms are gender-neutral, and tags simply list the item type and price. It’s a refreshing shopping experience compared to the rigid season- and trend-led layouts of many stores built around gender binaries. The multitude of items found in secondhand stores allow shoppers to celebrate themselves and their bodies by offering the variety needed to let them experiment with fashion and curate a unique take on dress that suits and celebrates them. Ignoring the gendered layout favoured by traditional stores welcomes in even more self-expression, letting shoppers break free not just from the supposed gender of an item, but the styling constraints imposed by the fashion calendar and the much-pushed trending styles we’re all told we want.
It may not even be a conscious realisation, this gender fluidity offered by secondhand shopping. When all styles of clothing are bundled together, we search through and pick out the things we like, not the things we think we should like. Whereas someone may never have ventured into the men’s or women’s section of a store, when the divide is removed and the clothes are all bought together, new favourite styles can be found and purchased without the imposed realisation that it’s ‘not meant for you’.
It’s not surprising that non-traditional methods of shopping have had to be adopted by those not wishing to subscribe to the gender binary. While most mainstream brands and stores continue to ignore the wish of shoppers for more inclusive collections, the gender fluid movement has been spearheaded by independent boutiques and smaller brands, with some luxury names choosing to jump on the bandwagon with select collections in the name of representation.
With Alessandro Michele at the helm of creative direction at Gucci, the brand’s collections have been notoriously gender neutral but have undoubtedly also had their problems. Since his appointment as creative director in 2015, Michele has helped to popularise an aesthetic of loveliness, textural richness, and glamour in mainstream men’s fashion, designing both the menswear and womenswear collections simultaneously, pulling ideas from one to the other and restyling the modern man into one just as likely to sport a Gucci dress as they are a Gucci loafer. Experimentation with the beautiful is at the forefront of Michele’s mind, bringing with his global platform a new level of acceptance that saw Harry Styles in a custom made dress on the cover of Vogue and Jared Leto in a Shakespearean evening gown at the 2021 Met Gala. But while he dishes out delicious soundbites like the hopeful, “The era of being masculine only if you have a specific suit—it's over,” he can finish the sentence with a clear misunderstanding of gender fluid fashion, “Also, women need men who are more connected with a woman's world.”
Clothes are clothes. Fashion is not about gender, it’s about expression and personality. That expression can, of course, present itself in more feminine or masculine forms, but by wearing more feminine clothes, is someone connecting more with ‘a woman’s world’? Or do they simply look and feel amazing in a dress that day?
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to speak about luxury fashion without mentioning its inaccessibility. With prices beginning in the thousands, for many, purchasing luxury items is simply not an option. The luxury market may be at the forefront of gender fluid or gender-re-imagined clothing, but their impact is felt little in the places it’s needed most. Add to this that the efforts of luxury and high street brands often don't reach the sustainability goals that are driving consumer behaviour, and the problems begin to outweigh the solutions. But turn to the thrift store and it checks both boxes.
The possibilities feel endless when you walk between the racks of extravagant secondhand clothing. You find vintage gowns next to worn ‘90s tees, and granny sweaters sandwiched between microskirts and shell suits. There’s a real sense that you can be whoever you want to be, even if that person changes from day to day. The feeling is freeing to people across the gender spectrum, unlocking infinite creative possibilities and bringing a real excitement about fashion back to a generation so weighed down by the wrongs of the industry. Perhaps that’s the real hope here. Dominated by nostalgia, ever-changing trends, and a culture that excludes many of the most creative, fashion has lost much of its draw. But gender fluidity could kickstart the seismic shift needed not only to revitalise the waning fashion industry, but define the decade as one of hope, acceptance and excitement.
Cover photo: Graphic by Oleksii via Dribbble