Not so long ago, telling someone your outfit was secondhand came with a tiny flinch — a little apology tucked into the sentence. In 2025, that flinch quietly vanished. Announcing you’d thrifted your coat stopped being a confession and became close to a “flex“. And the numbers behind that shift are genuinely eye-watering.
Thrifting grew up
Secondhand has thoroughly shed its charity-shop stigma and gone mainstream — not as a budget compromise or a worthy sustainability gesture, but simply as how an enormous slice of people now choose to dress.
The ThredUp Resale Report laid it out plainly. The US secondhand apparel market grew 14% in 2024 — its strongest year since 2021 — and, most strikingly, expanded roughly five times faster than the new-clothing market. It sat around $50 billion for the year and was projected to climb toward $56 billion in 2025, while online resale specifically shot up 23%. Globally, the market is well north of $200 billion and growing at a double-digit clip. And a record 58% of Americans bought something secondhand in 2024. This is not a niche anymore; it’s a tidal shift.
What tipped it from worthy to normal was, of all things, your phone. Depop, Vinted, ThredUp, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective — the whole ecosystem got slicker, searchable, and sociable, to the point where nearly four in ten younger shoppers now buy secondhand directly through a social media post. The old wall between “the thrift store” and “the scroll” dissolved. Buying pre-loved got as frictionless as buying new, and that, more than any noble motive, is what cracked it open.
The tariff tailwind
There’s a straightforward economic engine under the trend too, and it’s worth understanding plainly. As import tariffs pushed up the price of new clothes — the vast majority of which America brings in from abroad — secondhand suddenly looked comparatively better value. Nearly 60% of shoppers said outright that if new clothes got pricier, they’d turn to resale; among millennials, it was closer to 70%.
There’s a neat logic to why resale is so well insulated here: your local secondhand rail is, in effect, a domestic supply chain. The clothes come from other people’s wardrobes down the road, not a container ship. Whatever’s happening with trade, that stock is already home. In an anxious year for prices, that quiet resilience made secondhand not just the ethical choice but frequently the shrewd one.
Your closet is an asset now
And here’s the shift I find most interesting, the one that reaches beyond fashion and into how you think about money.
When a garment can be resold — easily, at a reasonable price, on an app in your pocket — buying it stops being pure spending and starts looking a little like acquiring an asset. Suddenly, the sensible questions change. Not just “do I love it?” but “will it hold its value?” Shoppers now plan to spend around a third of their clothing budget on secondhand, and once you start thinking in resale value, cheap-and-disposable loses its shine fast. A well-made piece that someone will happily buy from you in five years is a genuinely different purchase from a trend-of-the-week item that’s landfill by autumn.
Which quietly rewrites the rules for the fashion industry, too. When resale grows five times faster than new retail, longevity and quality stop being nice-to-haves and become hard commercial logic -the Clothing built to last is clothes worth making. It’s the same principle I keep coming back to — that the smartest money goes toward things that genuinely hold their worth rather than just their newness.
So the next time you thrift something wonderful, skip the apology. You didn’t settle. You bought an asset, dressed it up as a bargain, and did the planet a quiet favour on the way out. That’s not a compromise. That’s just good sense, wearing an excellent coat.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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