Background

As a working class kid born in a cotton mill town near Manchester, England, I remember my loud ‘aww muuuum…’ objection when my mother bought thrifted garments. Without really knowing why, I felt the class stigma associated with having to buy second hand clothes. It was only as a (first generation) student attending art college in London, that I became aware of a different world in which thrifted garments were considered ‘cool’.

I have worked in fashion and sustainability for most of my professional life. Whilst working as a designer at ESPRIT in the 1990’s, I developed a framework for approaching sustainability - reducing product impacts and bringing viable alternatives to market - which was adopted industry-wide. But over the years, this approach has seen the negative impacts of the fashion industry increase, as incrementally improving individual products fails to keep pace with a company’s or the clothing industry’s growth in sales.

Yet, in 2021, the CEO of fast fashion company Primark delivered an address at a fashion and sustainability conference. It began:

‘I make no apologies for being a large volume retailer. 

We bring sustainable fashion to our customers at a price they can afford’.

 The statement delivered a blunt truth about the current sustainable fashion movement; its expense, its privileged market, and its inaccessibility to lower income-level customers.

Second Hand Label Stories is based on the premise that everyday people may be willing to publicly indicate their second hand purchases and that this coding could be leveraged as a potent tool to challenge the power of brands in perpetuating the ‘culture of the new’.

The project aims to bring social norms in fashion/clothing to the surface, and to elevate diverse voices / narratives in the sustainable fashion movement. The label is deployed as a ‘hook’ to spark conversations and reflections with everyday people about the usually invisible act of purchasing second hand. The conversations reveal a variety of emotions associated with resale, society and culture, prompt participants to reflect, and start to unfreeze stigmas and behavioral norms.

Process

Typically I sit in second hand stores close to the check-out registers with a sewing machine, threads and labels, and invite customers to provide input on revealing their second hand purchases with an outside label.

Three simple questions lead the conversations:

Would you opt to label your thrifted garment on the outside after purchase?

Why?

Why not?

I then document the conversations and, when customers opt in, sew the label into their garments free of charge and photograph the person with their purchase.