Like the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” thrifting is a global phenomenon. The practice of purchasing secondhand clothing spans many countries, and the concept of thrift stores can be traced back to Europe and America (Formichella, 2023).
With this, it is no surprise that the current global thrift culture highlights the dynamics between the global North and the global South. As Prošić-Dvornić (2022) notes, the global exchange of used clothing, which began with 19th-century rag trade networks, has since evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry that connects the global North with the global South.
Kazmi (2023) reports that the concepts of thrift stores date back to the early 19th century when charities would sell second-hand clothing to raise funds. However, it was during the Great Depression that it started gaining widespread popularity. Since people struggled to make ends meet during the Depression, they turned to thrift stores as a more affordable option. With this, a stigma surrounding thrift stores started to form; people who shopped there had no money. TIME Magazine reports that the items were a sign of a lack of money and there was bias against the people selling them.
Fast-forward to current times, thrift culture in the global North thrives. Fashion United reports that a study conducted by Public Desire determined that the USA, the United Kingdom, and Sweden are the top three countries with the largest thrift shopping culture based on factors such as the number of thrift stores, the size of the resale market, the yearly expansion of second-hand businesses, and consumer engagement. This comes in the form of establishments like Goodwill, a chain of thrift stores that resell lightly used items that have been donated. The study also reports that in the USA, 93% of the population is engaged in online second-hand shopping. With this, online thrifting has skyrocketed in popularity in the past few years after the pandemic, through Depop and Vinted, examples of platforms used by mostly young people to personally resell their secondhand clothing.
Similar behaviors can be observed in the Philippines, with thrift shopping both through physical stores and online stores have been seeing an increase in popularity. However, there is a stark difference in the clothing that Western thrift stores sell and Asian thrift stores.