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episode 79

Secondhand News (the recurring and always controversial trend of secondhand fashion) - Part 4: The 2010s

March 25th, 2023

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Welcome to episode 79 of The Department, part four in our continuing series about the history of secondhand shopping as a social, retail, and style trend. Today we’re going to dig into a time that feels so far away, yet was just a few years ago, the 2010s, or as some people call them, “the aughties.” I gotta say, working on this part of the series was really weird because the first half of the decade felt so far away! And as I was reading and researching, it started to feel like there was this clear dividing line in the decade, sorta BT and AT (before Donald Trump and after Donald Trump). And yeah the BT era was full of long brunches, maximalist rock and roll 70s style, avocado toast, hooking up with normcore dudes, and significantly less anxiety about current events. How about you, Kim, what fashion trends of the 2010s stick with you the most?

Is it weird to feel nostalgic for a time that was really not that long ago? And is that a testament to just how difficult this decade has been so far?

Thoughts on the end of Bed, Bath, and Beyond: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/24/1152070914/bed-bath-the-great-beyond-how-the-home-goods-giant-went-bankrupt

I thought we would get started by talking about the economic situation many of us were dealing with in the 2010s:

2010 began pretty badly. The economy was still struggling with the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and the following recession. Hiring was at a standstill. And consumer sentiment was at an all-time low.
Through the decade, we saw the rise of the gig economy: Uber, Lyft, food delivery, and permanent freelancing. Technically a drop in unemployment, but…these jobs were inconsistent, didn’t include benefits, and didn’t offer a lot of security.
Rent increases continued to outpace wage growth.
Millennials were realizing pretty fast that their jobs weren’t covering rent *and* student loan payments.
Wealth inequality continued to widen and this was when we started to hear a lot of talk about the “1 percenters.” And oh yeah, Occupy Wall Street happened.
We also saw a lot of “millennials killed _____ thinkpieces,” which are still kinda my favorite thing to read. Just some of the things millennials killed: Breastaurants, diamonds, cable tv, chain restaurants, beer, paper napkins, department stores, ironing, marriage, divorce, hotels, mayonnaise, canned tuna.
What these “millennials killed____” pieces were really showing (even if they weren’t telling) is that millennials were in both a unique financial situation (far worse than their parents) and had different tastes for things.

In general, many people were continuing to struggle financially. But secondhand shopping as a mainstream way of life wasn’t a big trend anymore. People had other affordable options: off price retailers, fast fashion brands, and dollar stores. This was also the golden era of “Tar-jay,” as an affordable destination for design-driven home goods and clothing.

People were getting really into dollar stores. And much like thrifting in the 70s and 80s, it wasn’t just low income people shopping at dollar stores. From a 2011 NYT story called “The Dollar-Store Economy:”

We are awakening to a dollar-store economy. For years the dollar store has not only made a market out of the detritus of a hyperproductive global manufacturing system, but it has also made it appealing — by making it amazingly cheap. Before the market meltdown of 2008 and the stagnant, jobless recovery that followed, the conventional wisdom about dollar stores — whether one of the three big corporate chains (Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree) or any of the smaller chains (like “99 Cents Only Stores”) or the world of independents — was that they appeal to only poor people. And while it’s true that low-wage earners still make up the core of dollar-store customers (42 percent earn $30,000 or less), what has turned this sector into a nearly recession-proof corner of the economy is a new customer base. “What’s driving the growth,” says James Russo, a vice president with the Nielsen Company, a consumer survey firm, “is affluent households.”

Financial anxiety — or the New Consumerism, if you like — has been a boon to dollar stores. Same-store sales, a key measure of a retailer’s health, spiked at the three large, publicly traded chains in this year’s first quarter — all were up by at least 5 percent — while Wal-Mart had its eighth straight quarterly decline. Dreiling says that much of Dollar General’s growth is generated by what he calls “fill-in trips” — increasingly made by wealthier people. Why linger in the canyons of Wal-Mart or Target when you can pop into a dollar store? Dreiling says that 22 percent of his customers make more than $70,000 a year and added, “That 22 percent is our fastest-growing segment.”

Overall, consumers just had so many other affordable options for shopping. And the rise of ecommerce made shopping for inexpensive things even easier: By the middle of the decade, Amazon offered the lowest prices on just about anything and every fast fashion retailer was building a bigger and better website.

Another thing that was sorta killing the appeal of secondhand shopping: The golden era of “bedbug” fear pieces.

“In a summer when bedbugs have crawled deep into New York City’s psyche, no one is more anxious than those shoppers who live to scout secondhand clothing shops and used-furniture stores. They are connoisseurs of what is hot, hip, a bargain. They know where the flea markets are and when the vintage shops are open.

And they are scared that bedbugs from the home of a former owner still call that $20 designer jacket or that fabulous $65 chair their castle.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/nyregion/02bedbugs.html?searchResultPosition=20

“In the spring, the first question from a student at a Fashion Institute of Technology course called “Is Vintage for You?” was, “Have you ever experienced any issues with bedbugs?”

Yet, despite all of these fears of bed bugs, the idea of mixing high/low fashion with vintage was picking up momentum. In fact, successfully pulling off this mix was considered the peak of fashion and personal style. And ultimately, it democratized fashion (well, sort of, but definitely not perfectly), ostensibly creating the feeling that anyone with great style (regardless of the balance in their checking account), could be a style icon.

A lot of this desire to mix things up was lead by the rise of “street style” photography.

From WWD:

Street style photography has long been a part of fashion week, but the phenomenon gained prestige and ubiquity in the 2010s thanks to the proliferation of social media. These street style images circulated on fashion blogs, web sites and Instagram more so than actual runway looks, spawning a budding class of influencers that today are industry powerhouses.

The dawn of the “street style star” can be credited in large part to the late New York Times photographer (and former WWD alum), Bill Cunningham. For decades, Cunningham was a fixture on the streets of New York, but he became a celebrity in his own right with a documentary about his work, which was released in 2011. The decade also saw the rise of other street style photographers, including Scott Schuman and Tommy Ton, who gave a platform to the self-styled fashion bloggers and put on display their widely acclaimed authentic style.

We also had The Sartorialist, Style Bytes (miss this one so much), Advanced Style….Kim, any favorite street style blogs of the era? We also can’t forget the Tumblr of it all from this era, allowing anyone to put together their own blog of style, art, and aesthetic, creating trends of its own! TBH this is making me think that I might want to do a nostalgic trend episode about the Tumblr trends of the 2010s.

We also see the rise of the original style blogger/influencers: Man Repeller, Blonde Salad, Song of Style, Something Navy, Style Bubble…Did I miss anyone memorable here?

This was also the era of the celebrity stylist, and some of the best known mixed vintage with big labels and small cult brands. Celebrities (like Kim Kardashian) began wearing vintage couture on the red carpet. Seeing all of these very mainstream mega stars being vintage elevated vintage to the status of luxury. High end boutiques began mixing vintage in with new stuff. Hip retailers (like Nasty Gal) did regular drops of high priced vintage. Secondhand luxury items began to pick up momentum as an aspirational aesthetic choice. And high end vintage show, A Current Affair was founded in 2010.

But more than any other era, fashion was learning heavily into vintage, both literallly and in more of a…knockoff sort of way. There were so many style trends that relied heavily (well, completely) on vintage aesthetic and style:

Normcore
Festival fashion and big time boho
1990s grunge and unisex dressing
In the second half of the 2010s, 70s became a trend again

And (unsurprisingly), late in the decade, nostalgia became a very big deal.

According to Google, “nostalgia” was the biggest fashion trend of 2018.

From Harpers Bazaar:

“It raises questions in my mind about whether we are more unhappy with the present time than usual,” Sarah Rose Cavanaugh, director of the Laboratory for Cognitive and Affective Science at Assumption College told Luisaviaroma about the trend. “We feel nostalgic for times in our past that we long to return to, at least temporarily. Could it be that, more than usual, we feel ourselves pulled backward to a time of our lives when things felt simpler, more connected, less divided?”

The top four fashion searches (according to Google) in 2018 were 1980s fashion, grunge fashion, 1990s fashion, and 2000s fashion. Btw, Fashion Nova was the number one search fashion brand that year.

Fashion of the 2010s began to take on this overall look of “maximal nostalgia.”

Yes, it was sort of a hipster thing to do, but millennials in general were used to being accused of narcissistic hipsterism (and killing the Olive Garden) by then.

If you’re aching for some near-recent nostalgia, I highly recommend checking out this article from i-D called “McQueen skulls and Mulberry Alexas: an introduction to early 2010s style.” It focused more on the first few years of the decade, when indie sleaze and ironic hipsterism were beginning to evolve and shift into something new. So it was still the era of Litas, SCARVES, skinny jeans, all the stuff we talked about in our 00s episodes. But we start to see a trend toward this “maximal nostalgia” aesthetic, that would become bigger and more important by the end of the decade, setting the stage for wild festival looks, heavy duty pattern mixing, the return of 70s maximalism, and conversely, the intentional blandness of normcore as a counter point.

From i-D:

“On the other side of town, thrifting for vintage clothes became commonplace for a more jobless, ukulele-busking look — Williamsburg and Brick Lane offering two sides of the same coin — but unlike today, a time in which most of us are in search for cult designer items, the 2010s were marked by a more innocent quest for sartorial classics like 40s-style tea dresses, old furs, beaten-up leather jackets and classic Americana denim/boots/fringed suede. Just good ol’ fashioned clothes! The idea was to throw it together with the ease of Alexa Chung, Florence Welch or Irina Lazareanu, pairing it with a floppy hat and laddered tights, maybe a pair of brogues. Voilà! There was also a kitsch rockabilly moment — think of anything polka dot, emblazoned with cherries, beehives and lots of eyeliner à la Amy Winehouse — sleaze meets twee. What brings all these girls together, though, is that they can all tell you where they were when they first discovered the work of Meadham Kirchhoff, the now-defunct iconic London label that served latter-day riot grrls. Look it up. If you’re going to want anything from the decade, at least make it a veritable piece of fashion history.”

Over time, as I mentioned, this evolved into what we commonly refer to as “festival aesthetic,” and the maximalist style blogger look that we now call “cluttercore.”

Another article that filled me with a ton of nostalgia (and excitement for the future), is this hot off the presses (well, like a month ago) article from Refinery 29 called, “Cluttercore: Why The 2010s Blogger Aesthetic Is Back In Style”

“Tumblr kids in fishnet tights and scuffed Dr. Martens established their scuzzy, soft grunge aesthetic. Meanwhile, fashion bloggers with Lookbook.nu accounts posted ‘fit pics in skinny jeans, camel coats and heeled ankle boots. Elsewhere, in the blogosphere, teenagers rummaged in their closets to try and recreate avant-garde runway looks or scoured thrift stores for original 1960s shift dresses to pair with clashing knee-highs.”

This “cluttercore” look was in sharp contrast to the skinny jeans and all-black chic of the early 2010s. Again, from Refinery 29:

“these bloggers and their contemporaries cultivated an anti-minimalist “cluttercore” fashion aesthetic characterized by rainbow hues, mismatched textures and a studied interest in vintage style. Celebrities like Elle Fanning, Florence Welch and Alexa Chung were also known for dressing in this chaotic, twee-adjacent style at the time, while established fashion faces like Iris Apfel and Anna Dello Russo were often credited as formative influences.

At the same time, popular blogging platform Blogger counted more than 2 million blogs related to fashion on their platform alone. Among these were diary-like personal style blogs that mixed backyard self-timer outfit portraits with fashion commentary, life updates, vintage mood boards, scans of scrapbooks, and film stills. The outfits themselves were experimental, involving lots of layering and a mixing of different vintage eras.”

This combination of style bloggers, Tumblr aesthetic, and the sheer volume of trends that involved vintage aesthetic lead to an increase in thrifting among the young and style forward. We weren’t quite in the era of online secondhand shopping–that wouldn’t get as big as it is now until this decade–but Depop and Poshmark did launch early in the decade. But most vintage shoppers were hitting up IRL stores, flea markets, thrift stores, eBay, and now Etsy. And while in previous years, specific decades had been the most desirable, now any era/decade was fine, with the most stylish people mixing up 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and anything before or after.

Still–thrifting isn’t for everyone–and retailers wanted to get in on all of the big trends of the decade, no matter how small or niche. After all, this was the fast fashion era, and retailers need a steady stream of newness and hot new trends to keep customers shopping. And so, it became very common for buyers and designers to have large sample budgets for purchasing vintage garments to copy. And TBH, everywhere I have worked in my career leaned into this in a HUGE way. Nasty Gal was an extreme example, but it was happening everywhere. And this definitely drove up the price of vintage on the market, because retailers had a much higher shopping budget (and less price resistance) than your average shopper. The weird challenge of it all? How to turn an extremely well made, high quality vintage garment into a $58 dress in 2016. Despite this, I would say that the 2010s were the most success retailers had ever had in turning vintage into something new. We had seen it fail in the 70s, occasionally work in the 80s (but only if it was 50s aesthetic), pick up momentum in the 90s, but really, really become a successful business model in the 2010s. The irony is not lost on me that the vintage of the past was used to create future garbage, as it’s hard to imagine many of these clothes surviving long enough to become true vintage.

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episode 79

Secondhand News (the recurring and always controversial trend of secondhand fashion) - Part 4: The 2010s

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