OUR THOROUGHLY MODERN GUIDE TO SHOPPING FOR SECOND-HAND AND PRE-LOVED LUXURY FASHION, FEATURING THE TIPS, HACKS AND TRIED-AND-TESTED METHODS FROM THE EXPERTS WHO KNOW BEST
THE SUNDAYS OF MY EARLY TEEN YEARS would often go something like this: after poring over the fashion supplements and earmarking certain suggested trends or outfits, my mum and I would head out to Cambridge’s most choice charity shops. The Salvation Army and Oxfam on Mill Road were favourites, and our challenge was to recreate what we had just seen in the London-dispatched glossies.
Thisishowmymumhadpulledtogether outfits when she was growing up as one of five girls during her rather puritanical upbringing, and, later, how she saw fit to nurture her child’s interest in fashion.
One particular instance of this routine has stuck in my mind. I’m pretty sure it was in an issue of ELLE UK (I’m not saying that for dramatic effect), where the credit for a skirt in a shoot read ‘Beyond Retro’. We flipped to the back of the magazine and found it in the directory: Beyond Retro, 110-112 Cheshire Street, E2 6EJ, and a phone number. A number my mum encouraged me to call, and ask: ‘Do you have that skirt?’ and then, spontaneously, ‘What kind of shop are you?’ At 13, I assume I knew what a vintage shop was, in theory, but that level of curation and accessibility was alien to me. Not long afterwards, directions in hand, we visited the Brick Lane institution, and just like that my little mind was blown.
This was no longer about finding the cheapest possible alternative to the proper thing. This was the real deal in and of itself: Letterman jackets, Mod shifts from the 1960s… the list went on. Why buy the new, expensive iteration when you could come here, to Beyond Retro, and buy the original?
Like many people, however, the pull of fast fashion and the desire to conform saw me forget some of this wisdom as I hit my late teens and early twenties. But finally, sometime in 2017, I remembered this essential truth: that buying pre-loved and vintage clothing was in every sense just as good, if not better, than buying new.
Of course, there is the unarguable evidence underpinning this truth, too: our planet simply can’t handle the amount of new clothing and accessories we are creating, not really wearing and subsequently discarding. Cotton is too thirsty a crop. Polyester is mostly made of petroleum (yup, oil). And too many garment workers are poorly paid, abused and unsafe, while piles of fabric waste are shipped to developing countries to rot on someone else’s soil. Not great stuff, really.
Things began to change during the Covid lockdowns. With the world on fire and plenty of time on some of our hands, resale sites were booming: ‘During the pandemic, people became more thoughtful about their purchases and w
