Hello, friends. Welcome to the next edition of Curb Alert, the newsletter where I muse on thrifting adventures in late-stage capitalism. (Here’s why I started it.)
At least twice in the past week I’ve seen some version of the question “When are clothes too gross to give away?” posted in the Facebook mom groups I’m in.
For example:
What do you do with your toddlers’ underwear that they’ve outgrown? Some he never even wore. I’d never try to sell them because that’s gross but I feel bad just tossing them.
And:
I wanted to get some thoughts about whether it is weird/gross to sell or donate a used bathing suit [that was worn only twice]. … Of course I would wash it, but would it be sanitary for another person to wear? What do you think?
There’s a lot to unpack here.
First of all, I clothe my children in used undies and have several thrifted swimsuits in my closet. So my initial reaction is annoyance at the judgmental tone. Both questions contain a kind of virtue signaling (sanitation signaling?) that assures everyone the person asking would never be at the receiving end of such gross clothing.
My personal boundaries for thrifted clothing come down to “I know it when I see it.” I usually — usually! — say no to anything with staining, mold/mildew, strong cigarette odor, or irrevocable pet messes. Nearly everything can be washed (today I’m wearing underwear I got from a Buy Nothing curb alert) however I do have a limit to how much effort I’m willing to put into doing laundry or handling a potential biohazard.
For giving away clothes, my standard is laundered and probably unstained. Whatever doesn’t meet that standard gets turned into a rag.
Everyone has different boundaries when it comes to thrifting, and I respect that. If you’ve grown up in a family that considers thrifting to be a sign of poverty or shame, that will shape your boundaries. If you’ve ever dealt with a bed bug infestation, you’re going to be a lot pickier about what and where you thrift. Body issues, sensory issues, allergies — there are a lot of understandable reasons for individual boundaries to exist where they do.
But I need to push back on this notion that the crotch is inherently more gross or unsanitary than any other body part when it comes to thrifted clothing. Armpits, feet, hands that touch everything, behind-the-knee sweat, runny noses, hair and dandruff — I mean, ugh, humans are gross. (The vagina, on the other hand, cleans itself. Just sayin’.)
And anyway, this is why laundry exists. If washing is good enough for a shirt to be thrifted, it’s good enough for underpants and swimsuits.
Yet I can’t blame people for worrying about what other people will think if they try to sell a used swimsuit or a 3-year-old’s undies on Facebook Marketplace. We’re all conditioned to buy more, and to buy new. Nobody is immune to the clickable allure of Amazon Prime and podcast ads.
Which brings me to fast fashion. These are the fashion-conscious clothes, usually made with polyfiber fabrics (ie., plastic), churned out in huge quantities by exploited workers, and sold cheap: Forever 21, SHEIN, Gap, Zara, H&M, Lularoe, and so on.
They’re overproduced on a such a mass scale that even new, unworn fast fashion goes straight to the dump. So we’re in a situation where the clothes we’re producing aren’t even necessarily worth enough to sell the first time around.
As fashion gets faster, I see it filter down into secondhand shops and Buy Nothing groups. Thrift racks are bursting with fast fashion brands. And these are clothes that had limited value to begin with, even before they ended up at Goodwill or in a Buy Nothing group.
The other day in an alley I scored this huge trash bag of mostly clothes:
I could barely lift the thing. It was stuffed with fast fashion-type clothes, some new with tags. Everything was clean, except for one dress smothered in cat hair and splotched with cat vomit (I washed it right away and it turned out totally fine). Unfortunately the clothes weren’t my size, so I ended up reposting the bag on Buy Nothing.
It feels like a public service to clean up trashed items and rehome them. It feels like I’m doing something, however small, to fight against this throw-away culture.
But, admittedly, when it comes to fast fashion, the clothes aren’t even that great. I say this as someone whose closet is filled with secondhand fast fashion. They’re cheaply made, they don’t fit well, they don’t last, and they have limited fashion viability (looking at you, cold-shoulder tops from 2016!).
So that’s the irony: at the same time we need to be reusing and recyling more, the things we have to repurpose are less and less worth saving. This isn’t just true for clothes. It’s true for the many consumer goods today that are not made to last — an intentional phenomenon called “planned obsolescence.”
I hope the output of fast fashion slows down as more people feel comfortable reusing, repurposing, selling or giving away their clothes — and, for those who can afford it, buying better-quality new clothes to begin with. I think the shift is already starting to happen, but it’s hard to tell from my extremely thrift-immersed reality. In the comments on those queries I quoted above about what to do with barely used underpants and swimsuits, the overwhelming consensus was that donating, reselling or otherwise repurposing is not only not gross, it is what many people are doing already.
By the way, if you want to learn about fast fashion, I loved Forever35’s interview with Aja Barber, author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism. (Start around 40:00.)
Vogue also interviewed Barber about how to quit fast fashion.
This has been an exciting week of Buy Nothing scores and give-aways, including a 120-piece Gucci Mane puzzle, but I will save that for the next Curb Alert.
In the meantime, stay adventurous and keep thrifting!