Second act: Why the allure of vintage and resale has kept its appeal time after time

Vintage fashion has always been popular, but in more recent years, with the buzz of sustainability and many of us opting for greener clothing choices, the idea of rewearing pieces and buying only pre-loved has become much more commonplace. Vintage no longer means rummaging through old car boot sales for thrifted gems or dusting off your grandmother’s old coat hidden in the loft from the ‘70s. Instead, the focus is now on carefully curated vintage resale sites, such as Tradera and ReRobe, along with quick and easy-to-use apps, such as Sellpy, where fashion experts have already done much of the legwork for you.

In fact, the rise in resale has been rather meteoric and it looks as if it shows no room for slowing down. The resale second-hand market is projected to double by 2025, reaching the eye-watering heights of 34 billion euro, while Swedish resale app Sellpy – the Scandinavian equivalent of clothing resale app Depop – has garnered nearly 65,000 followers on Instagram and has had a mid double-digit growth of number of users from 2020 to 2021.

“It’s a whole different market compared with when I started working with fashion auctions more than ten years ago. Customers have learnt that they can get amazing quality fashion when shopping vintage with awareness,” explains Beata Af Donner, fashion expert at online vintage clothing shop Pete & Harry. “I’m sure awareness and concerns about sustainability is a big part of it, in combination with the fact that the market has evolved immensely in recent years.”

But not only is vintage fashion positive for the planet, it also offers the wearer a highly individual, and often one-of-a-kind tailored look. Today, this translates as a break away from the masses and an opportunity stand out from the Insta ‘it crowd’ by staking your own distinctive style claim. “Vintage is obviously a better choice for the environment, but not only that, it’s also the best option if you want to be unique and find your own style whilst staying on a budget,” explains Vogue Scandinavia’s senior fashion editor Robert Rydberg.

“A wardrobe usually contains old and new items, it's a mix of things we have inherited from a relative, gotten from a friend or bought on the high street. So therefore it felt only right to showcase this representation in a fashion editorial – we asked ourselves why most fashion editorials only include new fashion when our wardrobe doesn't.”

Not forgetting the other allure of opting for pre-worn pieces, perhaps the strongest pull of all: nostalgia. When you put on someone else’s much-loved, and well worn, items, you are dressing in another’s heritage and history – a capsule to a different in time and place. Perhaps no one understands this quite so intimately as Ingela Bendt, the author of Ruth's Garderob - en modehistoria, who has carefully collected and curated her own mother’s special collection for many years.

Her mother, who lived in a tiny town called Mjölby, 250 kilometres south of Stockholm, was a devoted fashion fanatic. Through studying the contents of her wardrobe Ingela has managed to gain a detailed insight into her mother Ruth’s life, along with a grasp of the kind of woman she was. “She was very interested in everything, like French films and novels. She studied fashion magazines and, of course, all the clothes – it was her main interest then,” she details.

Rummaging through people’s old items not only gives us a sense of who they were and what their lives were like, but it also sheds light on the fashion tastes and trends of the same period and the impact they have on style, even decades on. “One interesting thing with this wardrobe is that you can see trends in the thirties, coming back in the seventies and things in the twenties, coming back in the sixties. For example, in the Second World War you had a very high shouldered sort of military ‘male looking’ fashion which then came back in the eighties,” explains Bendt.

Vintage shopping, be that IRL at spots such as Stockholm’s 59 Vintage Store and Copenhagen’s Time’s Up vintage or online, also offers the adrenaline-fuelled rush of the chase: the hunt to find that perfect treasure. Granted, it might take a little longer than simply clicking ‘buy’ on Net-A-Porter, it certainly feels all the more sweeter. “Since vintage stores offer unique on-off in just one size, unlike fast fashion stores, the thrill and pleasure of finding an item that actually fits is so much bigger,” comments Rydberg.

“And considering my size has always been outside of the 'regular' (normative) ones, vintage has become my best option when finding fashion that fits. So for anyone who recognises this, I sincerely recommend vintage fashion. Items sourced secondhand are most often of better quality than newly procured items, which in itself also heighten the pleasure of finding that one item, you know it will live with you for years and years.”