How Secondhand Clothes Went From Scandalous to Chic

Secondhand shopping was once considered dishonest and dangerous, but thrift stores rebranded it as virtuous charity in the 1920s, paving the way for today’s booming vintage market.

Summary of The Resale Revival. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:42 — In the 1800s, wearing secondhand clothes was seen as socially unacceptable and morally wrong, associated with dishonesty and attempted class deception.
• 00:02:02 — A popular 1880s short story warned that buying used clothes could bring disease and ruin to your entire family, serving as a moral lesson against status-seeking.
• 00:03:43 — Anti-Semitism heavily influenced the stigma against secondhand shopping because Jewish peddlers and merchants dominated the used clothing trade.
• 00:06:24 — Thrift stores were invented in the 1890s-1900s as clean, stationary alternatives to street peddlers, and crucially were founded by Christian churches like the Methodists rather than Jewish operators.
• 00:08:37 — The Goodwill bag system reframed donating old clothes as convenient and charitable, making people comfortable disposing of viable clothing so they could buy new items.
• 00:15:33 — After World War II, Goodwill’s income increased by 580% as people began getting rid of and replacing clothing, marking a major shift in secondhand acceptance.
• 00:17:51 — In 1957, affluent New Yorkers began selling 1920s raccoon fur coats through high-end department stores branded as vintage, transforming old clothes from shameful to desirable.
• 00:22:37 — The RealReal revolutionized consignment by bringing it online, connecting buyers and sellers across thousands of miles and removing gatekeeping that existed in small local shops.
• 00:31:13 — Modern vintage success depends on pieces being timeless enough to wear today without looking costumey, meaning the best resale items are those too ahead of their original era to seem dated now.

In depth

Why used clothes were once considered dangerous, not just déclassé

Dr. Jennifer Lizotte’s centerpiece example, the 1880s Saturday Evening Post story “The Blue Silk,” isn’t just a quaint curiosity — it’s a window into a specific anxiety about identity in industrializing America. The plot has a girl buy a secondhand dress to attend a party above her means, get publicly recognized as wearing someone else’s castoff, and then bring home yellow fever that ravages her family and permanently marks her looks 00:02:02. Lizotte reads this as a punishment narrative aimed squarely at aspiration: the moral isn’t that disease lurks in old fabric, it’s that misrepresenting your social station will be found out and punished 00:02:26.

The reasoning behind why this fear was so acute traces back to urbanization. As people flooded into anonymous, rapidly growing cities in the mid-to-late 1800s, the old markers that let you place a stranger’s background and class simply stopped working 00:02:52. Etiquette books of the 1850s explicitly warned readers not to judge people by their clothes, precisely because clothes had become an unreliable signal — a con man in a good secondhand suit could pass as a gentleman 00:03:23. This is the same anxiety that produced the literary archetype of the confidence man, memorialized in Melville’s novel of that title, where disguise through dress is the central threat 00:03:33.

What’s left a little unresolved is why this fear focused so specifically on clothes rather than other forms of deception available in an anonymous city — money, speech, manners. Lizotte’s answer, offered somewhat provisionally, is that clothing was uniquely legible and uniquely faked, making it the flashpoint for a broader Victorian panic about trust among strangers.

The anti-Semitic roots of the secondhand stigma, and how thrift stores laundered it

The stigma against used clothes wasn’t just about disease and deception — Lizotte is blunt that it was substantially anti-Semitic, since the secondhand trade in Europe and then in American cities was disproportionately run by Jewish peddlers and merchants 00:03:43. This wasn’t accidental: Jews had historically been legally barred from many mainstream trades in Europe, which pushed them into tailoring, rag-selling, and resale as one of the few economic lanes available to them, a pattern that carried over when they arrived in places like New York 00:04:19. The recorded street cries of peddlers hawking “old clothes” on pushcarts are presented as literal audio evidence of this economy in action 00:05:01.

The pivotal turn came in the 1890s and 1900s, when germ theory gave new, seemingly scientific legitimacy to what had really been a prejudice about “filth” 00:06:09. This is the moment thrift stores were invented as a deliberate alternative: stationary, price-tagged, advertised as sanitized with industrial washing machines — and, crucially, founded by Protestant organizations rather than Jewish ones 00:06:24. Lizotte traces this explicitly to Methodist theology, noting that John Wesley’s own formulation linking cleanliness to godliness underpins the founding logic of groups like the Salvation Army (started in England, arriving in New York in 1897) and Goodwill (started in Boston in 1902 from a bag-collection system for housewives) 00:07:29.

The unresolved tension here is that these organizations needed alternative revenue because they couldn’t rely purely on tithing, so the moral marketing of thrift stores as charitable and clean served a fundraising purpose as much as a public-health one 00:07:21. In other words, the stigma against Jewish secondhand sellers wasn’t erased so much as reassigned to a new, Christian-branded institution that could sell the identical product — used clothes — while stripping away the taint. By the 1920s, as Jewish immigrants themselves began to be racially reclassified as white, especially relative to newer immigrant groups, the whole framework shifted again, and pushcart secondhand selling was increasingly taken up by Black Americans during the Great Migration, only to be regulated out of city streets in favor of formal flea markets 00:12:40.

How the same objects flipped from cursed to charmed: Great Depression, wartime windfall, and the raccoon coats

One of the more counterintuitive claims in the conversation is that the Great Depression, despite obvious economic logic, was not a boom time for secondhand clothes. Lizotte says demand for used clothing rose, but supply collapsed because people simply stopped discarding what they owned, and corporate records show Goodwill and Salvation Army stagnating through the 1930s 00:13:20. It’s only after the Depression that both supply and demand aligned, and social acceptability crept upward. The 1942 film “Tales of Manhattan” is offered as a cultural artifact of this ambivalence: a secondhand tailcoat travels between owners, sometimes cursing the wealthy who wear it and sometimes blessing the poor, suggesting the old moral certainty about used clothes as pure contamination was breaking down into something more ambiguous 00:14:12.

The real inflection point, though, is the postwar economy: Goodwill’s income reportedly jumped 580% after World War II as Americans discarded old clothes to buy new ones 00:15:33. It’s in this exact window that the word “vintage” — previously reserved almost exclusively for wine, denoting simply a year of production, later loosened into a vaguer marker of quality via the phrase “circa vintage” — began attaching itself to clothing, first appearing in scare quotes and only later without them 00:14:57.

The story Lizotte tells to mark that final legitimization is oddly specific: in 1957, a Greenwich Village couple, the Saltzmans, with Sue Saltzman dressing in a deliberately anachronistic 1920s flapper style, discovers a stash of genuine 1920s raccoon fur coats — the same coats fetishized in the era’s college fad and its novelty song — sitting unclaimed because most originals had been cut up to supply the 1950s Davy Crockett hat craze 00:17:25. She and a friend start selling the surviving originals, and department stores like Lord & Taylor, Macy’s, and Bergdorf’s begin advertising them, unironically, as vintage 00:17:51. What makes this pivotal for Lizotte is that the desirability wasn’t despite the coats’ age and prior ownership — it was because of it: postwar college kids wanted an imagined connection to a glamorized 1920s youth culture, converting a previous liability (having been worn by someone else, being old) into the entire point of the purchase 00:18:14.

Consignment as a distinct lineage, and why it scaled differently than thrift

A key distinction drawn in the conversation is that consignment shops are structurally different from thrift or charity stores, even though both deal in used goods. Thrift stores like Goodwill operate on donation: people give away clothes and the org resells them, keeping all proceeds for its mission 00:19:13. Consignment, by contrast, is described as a co-op arrangement — the original owner supplies the item and shares in the profit when it sells, meaning consignment shops have historically been more selective and higher-end, since they’re implicitly promising quality control (a working zipper, an intact garment) that a donation-based thrift store never guaranteed 00:21:30.

Lizotte’s example of Washington, D.C. consignment shops used by ambassadors’ and diplomats’ wives is meant to illustrate that consignment customers were rarely pure buyers or pure sellers — the same person might consign an expensive gown after one wearing and use the resulting credit to acquire another gown from the same shop, creating a closed loop of recirculation among people who needed formalwear repeatedly but didn’t want to be seen repeating outfits 00:21:46. But this model, she notes, remained stubbornly local and small-scale for decades — dependent on physical proximity between a limited pool of consignors and buyers in a given city.

The claim made about The RealReal is that it didn’t just digitize this existing consignment model, it broke the geographic constraint that had always limited it, letting consignors and buyers connect across huge distances and giving anyone, regardless of local access to a curated boutique, a shot at designer pieces without the class gatekeeping historically associated with in-person luxury retail 00:22:55. This is presented less as an invention of something new than as a scaling and democratizing of an old, geographically bottlenecked practice — though the underlying co-op logic of consignment (shared profit between original owner and reseller) is described as essentially unchanged since its earlier, smaller-scale postwar form 00:22:30.

What makes a vintage piece sellable now: timelessness over era-accuracy

Dominic Hallas, who runs the vintage operation at The RealReal, offers a claim that inverts an intuitive assumption about vintage value: the most desirable old garments are often the ones that don’t look like they belong to their era at all. He explicitly says the team will pass on pieces that read as visibly dated, because the strongest resale performers were originally so far ahead of their moment that they still look current 00:31:03. The company’s formal cutoff for the vintage designation is 15 years old, but Hallas stresses that the operative criterion isn’t age alone — it’s demonstrated cultural or design impact, meaning the vintage team is doing real archival work, cross-referencing runway photography and even identifying which creative director was at a house during a given season (his example: distinguishing Céline under Michael Kors from Céline under Phoebe Philo) before pricing an item 00:30:03.

Hallas frames this as a genuine shift in the vintage market since he started attending vintage clothing shows around 2010, when the inventory mostly looked visibly of its era, worn largely by people wanting to costume themselves in the past. Now, he argues, the desirable pieces are ones indistinguishable from — or actively referenced by — contemporary design, and current fashion is constantly quoting older collections, blurring the line between

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.