FROM THE DEPARTMENT: Secondhand News (the recurring and always controversial trend of secondhand fashion),Part 4: The 2010s

Summary

Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty: FROM THE DEPARTMENT: Secondhand News, Part 4 - The 2010s

Release Date: April 17, 2025

In Episode 79 of Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty, host Amanda Lee McCarty delves into the intricate landscape of secondhand fashion during the 2010s. Co-host Kim joins her to explore how economic shifts, cultural trends, and the rise of social media influenced the secondhand market, ultimately shaping contemporary fashion consumption.

1. Setting the Stage: Economic and Cultural Climate

Amanda and Kim begin by contextualizing the 2010s within the broader economic and cultural backdrop. The decade was marked by the lingering effects of the 2008 financial crisis, leading to a prolonged recession that significantly impacted consumer behavior and fashion trends.

Amanda (01:45):
"The 2010s began pretty badly. The economy was still struggling with the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession. Hiring was at a standstill, and consumer sentiment was at an all-time low."

The rise of the gig economy introduced a new form of employment characterized by flexibility but lacking in benefits and job security. This economic uncertainty fostered a "hustle culture," where millennials juggled multiple jobs to meet escalating living costs, including rent and student loans.

2. The Resurgence and Challenges of Secondhand Fashion

Against this economic backdrop, secondhand shopping emerged as a viable option for many. However, it faced stiff competition from fast fashion retailers and off-price stores like Target, Nordstrom Rack, Marshalls, and TJ Maxx, which offered affordable alternatives that overshadowed traditional thrift stores.

Kim (05:07):
"We actually talked about earlier in the series how there was a real shakeup in 2016. Everything just changed at that precipice."

The introduction of fast fashion brands brought clothing that was both trendy and inexpensive, making it difficult for thrift stores to compete on price. Additionally, the proliferation of dollar stores provided another affordable shopping avenue, further diminishing the appeal of secondhand stores.

3. Bed Bath and Beyond: A Case Study in Retail Decline

A significant highlight of the episode is the discussion on the decline and eventual closure of Bed Bath and Beyond, a retail giant synonymous with household goods. Amanda and Kim reflect on the store's strategy of allowing individual managers to select inventory, which led to inconsistent product quality and a disconnect with consumer expectations.

Amanda (10:00):
"They tried to get into a lot more private label stuff, marked them up really high, and sold via coupons. It somehow worked for Kohl's, but it was not working for Bed Bath and Beyond."

The over-inventory and misguided pricing strategies resulted in declining store traffic and empty aisles, signaling the end of an era for the once-popular retailer.

4. The Bedbug Panic: Impact on Secondhand Shopping

The 2010s also witnessed a widespread bedbug scare, which significantly deterred consumers from purchasing secondhand items. The fear of infestations made many hesitant to shop at thrift stores or purchase used clothing and furniture.

Kim (26:11):
"That actually really makes a lot of sense how those two elements that were like deeply seated in the consumer consciousness would really affect the sales."

Bedbugs became a recurring theme in media and personal anecdotes, heightening anxiety around secondhand shopping and further challenging the market's growth.

5. Street Style and the Social Media Revolution

A pivotal shift during the 2010s was the rise of street style photography and the influence of social media platforms like Instagram and Tumblr. These platforms democratized fashion, allowing everyday individuals to become style icons and trendsetters, thereby elevating the status of vintage and secondhand clothing.

Amanda (29:56):
"Street style photography has long been a part of fashion week, but it gained prestige and ubiquity in the 2010s thanks to the proliferation of social media."

Influential photographers like Bill Cunningham, Scott Schumann, and Tommy Ton captured the essence of street fashion, which often showcased a blend of high and low fashion elements. This movement fostered a culture where mixing vintage pieces with contemporary trends became the epitome of personal style.

6. Vintage as Luxury: Fast Fashion’s Appropriation

The 2010s saw vintage clothing transcend its niche status to become a luxury statement. High-end retailers and fast fashion brands began incorporating vintage aesthetics into their collections, often leading to the appropriation and replication of classic designs at lower price points.

Amanda (35:00):
"Seeing these mainstream megastars like Gwyneth Paltrow and Miley Cyrus wearing vintage gowns elevated vintage to the status of luxury."

Retailers like Nasty Gal capitalized on this trend by offering high-priced vintage drops alongside their affordable collections, catering to both affluent customers seeking exclusivity and budget-conscious shoppers looking for unique pieces. However, this strategy also led to price inflation in the vintage market, making true vintage items less accessible.

7. The Emergence of Cluttercore and Micro Trends

As the decade progressed, the fashion landscape became increasingly fragmented with the emergence of micro trends such as cluttercore, pleating a chaotic blend of colors, textures, and patterns. This aesthetic was a departure from the minimalist and normcore trends of the early 2010s, embracing maximalism influenced by varied vintage eras.

Amanda (51:22):
"Cluttercore is characterized by rainbow hues, mismatched textures, and a studied interest in vintage style. It's about mixing color and texture without worrying about eras or budgets."

Platforms like Tumblr and personal style blogs fueled these micro trends, allowing individuals to curate highly personalized fashion statements that often combined elements from different decades, reflecting a broader trend of nostalgic eclecticism.

8. Digital Transformation: Online Secondhand Platforms

The latter part of the decade witnessed the rise of online secondhand marketplaces such as Depop, Poshmark, Vinted, and The RealReal. These platforms revolutionized secondhand shopping by making it more accessible and mainstream, facilitating easier buying and selling of pre-owned items.

Amanda (64:22):
"It's easier than ever to shop secondhand, thanks to online platforms. We've seen live sales on Instagram, which are like modernized versions of QVC."

These digital transformations not only expanded the reach of secondhand shopping but also introduced new dynamics around pricing and authenticity, leading to debates within the community about ethical reselling and price gouging.

9. Ethical Debates and the Future of Secondhand Fashion

The episode culminates with a discussion on the ethical controversies surrounding secondhand fashion, particularly the pricing strategies employed by resellers. Amanda shares her personal experience of being falsely accused of unethical practices, highlighting the intense scrutiny and polarized opinions within the vintage community.

Amanda (69:43):
"Someone accused me of participating and encouraging genocide, which was a bit heavy-handed. It reminded me of what a messed-up place the Internet can be."

Despite these challenges, both hosts express optimism about the future of secondhand fashion, envisioning it becoming a normalized and respected aspect of everyday life. They advocate for the inherent value and sustainability of secondhand shopping, contrasting it with the declining quality of fast fashion offerings.

Kim (73:24):
"I think it's only going to become a bigger part of the culture at large because it's been adopted by so many more people and there's a lot less stigma against it."

Amanda echoes this sentiment, emphasizing the importance of secondhand fashion in providing durable and quality clothing alternatives, ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and inclusive fashion industry.

Conclusion: Navigating the Past and Future of Secondhand Fashion

As the episode wraps up, Amanda and Kim reflect on the transformative journey of secondhand fashion throughout the 2010s. They acknowledge the decade's role in shaping contemporary fashion norms, driven by economic pressures, technological advancements, and evolving cultural values. Looking ahead, they anticipate that secondhand shopping will continue to integrate seamlessly into mainstream fashion, supported by digital innovations and a growing awareness of sustainability.

Amanda (75:08):
"My hope is that secondhand will become just a normal part of day-to-day life because most of the clothes brand new are incredibly disappointing."

Kim concurs, underscoring the ongoing momentum towards embracing secondhand fashion as a staple in luxury and everyday wardrobes alike.

Kim (75:15):
"Only imagine that it will become a bigger part of just the culture at large because it's been adopted by so many more people and that there's a lot less of a stigma against it."

Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty offers a comprehensive exploration of secondhand fashion's evolution in the 2010s, highlighting its resilience and adaptability amidst economic challenges and cultural shifts. The episode underscores the enduring relevance of secondhand shopping in promoting sustainable and personalized fashion choices, setting the stage for future discussions on the subject.

Transcript

[Amanda]

Hi, I'm Amanda.

[Kim]

And I'm Kim.

[Amanda]

And this is the department, a podcast about trends and how they define the world around us. Well, welcome, Everybody, to episode 79. 79 seems like it should be a sexier number than it is. Like, it should have a special. Some special quality to it. Right. I don't know. Anyway, it's a good signing number.

[Kim]

I think it's just because it's so. It sounds so similar to 69.

[Amanda]

Is that what it is? I'm like, oh, 89 now there's a good number anyway.

[Kim]

Yeah, there's, like, a lot of roundness to it.

[Amanda]

Dang. Okay. This is a PG13 podcast, so I guess we can say roundness when we're talking about numbers, but this is episode 79 of the department, and it is part four in our continuing series about the history of secondhand shopping as a social, retail, and style trend. And this is kind of where we're gonna end our conversation about secondhand, at least for now. But we know that.

[Kim]

I'm shocked. I feel like, you know, just every time I meet with. You've got more and more and more.

[Amanda]

I know. Well, we did already talk before we were recording that there are a few other sort of, like, micro trends and phenomena with Anne's Secondhand that we'll probably revisit in the future. I also, you know, something I'd been thinking about as I was working on all these episodes is I was like, you know, a lot of the icons and films that we have talked about in terms of how they've influenced secondhand shopping in the past, they were really. There were a lot of white people, and it really bugged me a lot. And I just couldn't find a more diverse range of people to show you all in terms of who was influencing secondhand fashion in the 80s and 90s. And I think a lot of that really speaks to the culture that we have lived in for so long.

[Kim]

You have to make some deep fakes.

[Amanda]

Yeah.

[Kim]

Just to put some of that collateral out there.

[Amanda]

Right. And so I did think, like, I would love to hear from all of you, maybe we can put a little thing out on the. Like, an all points bulletin on our Instagram account. Just wanting to, like, hear from you other icons of secondhand and vintage, because I think it would be great for us to do a little. A little episode about those, maybe when I come back from Japan. So just something for us. I don't know. I would love to hear from all of you because, you know, I was just, like, really heads down in the research and following where the mainstream media of that time took me. And, you know, in the 80s and 90s, I mean, it was very white focused, obviously. Right. So I don't know. I just think there's a lot of opportunity there.

[Kim]

Amanda, did you see on Instagram when I released a poll about the pretty in pink dress and how people kind of felt about it if they were indifferent, if they loved it, or if they did not like it so much?

[Amanda]

I did. Honestly, I'm really disappointed in all of you because I wanted all of you to agree that it's terrible. Were you surprised? Were you surprised by the outcome?

[Kim]

Yeah, I was surprised. I mean, there were a lot of people that definitely thought it was pretty terrible.

[Amanda]

It was really terrible.

[Kim]

But it was. It was very divided.

[Amanda]

Yeah. I believe someone said that they thought it looked like mother of the bride. And I was like, yeah, nailed it. That is exactly what that silhouette was, and I don't care for it. So today we're gonna dig into a time that feels so far away, yet was somehow just a few years ago. And that's the 2000 and tens, or as some people call them, maybe. Maybe just Kim the Audie.

[Kim]

Just me.

[Amanda]

Right.

[Kim]

I feel like I read it somewhere and so I just use it. I'm like that.

[Amanda]

I like it. I've been throwing it out there. I like it too.

[Kim]

I like that that works. Because the 2010s does not roll off the tongue.

[Amanda]

It's a lot of syllables.

[Kim]

It's weird.

[Amanda]

Yeah, it's weird.

[Kim]

It looks weird. The Audis also, most people don't know what it means.

[Amanda]

So. Yeah, let's make the Audis a thing. Right? Audis, Audis, Audis. Oh, my God. I think I just did that to the theme of, like, when you're playing Super Mario Brothers, and it's like, oddies, oddies, oddies. Okay. Anyway, I gotta say that working on this series, this part of the series was really weird because the first half of the decade felt so far away to me, you know? And as I was reading and researching, it started to feel like there was this clear dividing line in the decade, which I'm calling bt and at before Donald Trump and after Donald Trump.

[Kim]

I actually think that's actually a really good point. And we'd actually been talking about that way earlier in the series when we were kind of talking about, like, there was just, like, a real shakeup in, like, 2016. And that's exactly what it is. But it came from every single cultural and, like, trend. Everything just changed. Right at that precipice.

[Amanda]

Yeah, definitely. And you know, the. The BT before Donald Trump era was full of long brunch, maximalist rock and roll, 70 style, avocado toast, hooking up with normcore dudes, and significantly less anxiety about current events. Like, I remember that. And I'm that person who's like, way into current events. I listen to NPR all the time. And yet I did not feel as if it was controlling my day to day life the way it did starting in 2016, as I was going through the 2010s and all these fashion trends that you and I, Kim, certainly have had to buy into, develop into as part of our jobs. I was wondering what fashion Trends of the 2010s really stick with you the most?

[Kim]

I think that's a really interesting question. I mean, because it was really the time of like, minimalism and costs and everything was, you know, Scandinavian.

[Amanda]

My God. Remember, need supply.

[Kim]

Oh, need supply. Exactly. Everything was kind of about millennial disruptors.

[Amanda]

Yes.

[Kim]

And how millennial disruptors really change the landscape of everything we did, how we shopped, what we wore. You know, even as we were looking at how J. Crew basically just dropped off in the early 80s and Everlane took over the entire market share.

[Amanda]

Mm. Yeah.

[Kim]

That just shows the complete shift of that trend. Athleisure.

[Amanda]

Oh, my God. I read so many articles. I've read so many articles in the past week about like, the style trends of 2010s, and the first one on every magazine or blogs list is Athleisure. Yeah, I mean, that was. That was game changing for sure. I don't know if it's weird to feel nostalgic for a time that was really not that long ago, but I definitely was filled with a lot of nostalgia as I was working on this. And I think that's a testament to just how difficult this decade, which, by the way, we're only three years into how difficult this decade has been so far. Like, I am excited to talk to you about this today because I had a lot of good memories, you know.

[Kim]

Yeah, I think you're gonna. Yeah, I think you're gonna kind of evoke some of those in all of us.

[Amanda]

I think so. I think so. And it's not as horrific as that aughts mainstream fashion that we talked about, which is also haunting me. So before we get into all that, Kim, why don't you lay your regular spiel on us?

[Kim]

Sure, of course. So follow rate and review. You know, make sure to do that on your preferred streaming service. You can Find us online on our website, the Department World. It has all of our show notes, all the image references, and links to our Instagram, which I highly recommend that you join and, you know, participate in. We are also taking tips, Dollar tips, actually. We are taking trend tips, too, but if you got a dollar tip or a couple dollars, a few bucks to donate, you can actually find a link in our Instagram page and donate a couple dollars. You know, we do this ad free. We do this for everyone. We do this for ourselves, but we do it for everyone else. So any help is appreciated.

[Amanda]

For sure. For sure. Before we go back to the Audis and get filled with lots of nostalgia, I thought it would be fun to just talk for a couple minutes or maybe sad that something else that I think evokes a lot of nostalgia in many of us, which is the end of Bed, Bath and Beyond. I don't know if you read this week, Kim, but they. It's done. Gonzo. Donezo.

[Kim]

It's. It's believably unbelievable. I mean, when was the last time you've been in a Bed, Bath and Beyond?

[Amanda]

Okay, well, once in 2021. Maybe it was 2020. No, it had been 2021. Our coffee grinder broke and, Kim, I literally went everywhere I could go looking for a replacement, and I ended up at Bed, Bath and Beyond. Like, that was the only place that had one. And it was the first time I'd been in one since you and I went to One Way back in Hollywood so you could swap out your SodaStream bottles. And it was weird in there so much. Just like randomness jammed in every corner. I know it was always like that, but it felt extra weird. Like, why were they selling Nyx makeup there? You know?

[Kim]

Yeah, they really had diversified. But the quality. Last time I was in there, everything was just garbage quality. I was like, is this the Dollar Store?

[Amanda]

Yeah. I mean, you can see looking back, I'm like, oh. The path was obvious where they were over inventoried. Then they tried to get into a lot more private label stuff, which they marked up really high and then sold via coupons, which does somehow work for Kohl's, but was not working for Bed Bath and Beyond. And everything I'd heard this morning on NPR is just like, this year the store has been getting emptier and emptier, and so you would go into whole alcoves of the store and they would just be empty.

[Kim]

Just a. It was a bad experience. I never liked going in there.

[Amanda]

Me neither. It's too much.

[Kim]

I mean, I Used to find it interesting, you know, because you could just actually, like, experience a lot of things that maybe you've kind of seen online. But, you know, it was just. Everything just felt like a cheap iteration of something that you wanted, but you didn't want that. You're like, I want this. I want this coffee grinder, but I don't want this coffee grinder.

[Amanda]

Right, right. I think they ended up shifting into a lot of their own stuff or exclusives that they could price higher and make higher margin on. And it just made it not a good source of the things you think of going to Bed Bath and Beyond for, you know. Yeah. So it's the end. I mean, there's a chance that someone could buy the chain and, you know, re. Rejuvenate it, but I think that is a pretty wild idea at this point. I don't think that's going to work. I will say there was one really interesting thing that I learned about Bad Bath and Beyond this week, and that is that they let the individual store managers pick the inventory for the stores.

[Kim]

Yes. I was reading, which is. And I was like, oh.

[Amanda]

Kind of made my head hurt thinking about it as a buyer. I know, I know.

[Kim]

Do you think it was all. All the product in the stores or just.

[Amanda]

I don't know if you're listening to this and you are someone, you know, worked in buying a Bed, Bath and Beyond or even was a store manager. Will you get to us about this? Because I want to know as a buyer, this just like, I can't. Like, I do not want the store managers picking out the product. I don't know how I would manage inventory or assortment. Plan or plan buys. Right. So, yeah, anyway, rip Bed Bath and Beyond and the legendary coupons.

[Kim]

Right. I know I did like those coupons, but it was like, okay, I'm gonna spend 20% off on garbage. Like, I just. Wow, compelling.

[Amanda]

It didn't. If you were the kind of person who takes the next level of, like, research into these kinds of things, like, they weren't a good deal. I remember specifically wanting to get a soda stream and knowing that they had them at Bed Bath and Beyond, signing up to get the coupon, looking at the price at Bed Bath and Beyond, calculating what the discount would be and saying, huh, that's the same price as Target. Like, they were just marking stuff up to accommodate the coupons and it Maybe not trust them, you know, so, yeah, that's disastrous. And I think that that's probably a big part of it too. Like, give your customers some Credit.

[Kim]

Right. You're just like ruining brand loyalty.

[Amanda]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, well, let's get started by talking about the economic situation that many of us were dealing with in the 2010s, because I think that's a good way to start talking about where we were secondhand. Because we have now that we've gone through decades of this, literally, we've seen how what's happening on the larger economic climate affects people's relationship with secondhand shopping. So 2010 began pretty badly. The economy was still struggling with a fallout of the two 2008 financial crisis and then the following recession. Hiring was at a standstill and consumer sentiment was at an all time low. It was like not a fun time. Throughout the decade, we saw the rise of the gig economy. Uber Lyft, food delivery, kind of like permanent freelancing. I mean, I had friends who were working on contract, which means not as a real employee for four, five, six, seven years, at all kinds of huge companies like Nike tv, You know, they were just freelancing forever. So they got no benefits. And that's the thing about all these jobs that were either freelance or like gig work. Sure, maybe they gave you some flexibility, although they didn't always. And they were inconsistent. They didn't include benefits and they didn't offer a lot of security. So people were just like working to exist in so many ways.

[Kim]

It was like the hustle economy too.

[Amanda]

Oh God, this is hustle culture. Yeah. Yeah. Rent increases continue to outpace wage growth. So one more reason, and that people are like, hustle, hustle, hustle. Millennials were realizing pretty fast that their jobs and jobs in plural, per person, so many were working. So many jobs weren't covering rent and student loans and food and anything else they needed. Wealth inequality continued to widen. And this is when we started to hear a lot of talk about the 1 percenters. And oh yeah, Occupy Wall street happened, which I like. I'm sorry, this probably makes me just like a terrible person, but I have forgotten about it. We also saw a lot of millennials killed. Blank Think pieces, which are, I have to say, Kim, are still kind of my favorite thing to read.

[Kim]

They are. I think they're really fun.

[Amanda]

I think they're really fun too. Just some of the things millennials killed. Restaurants, diamonds, cable television, chain restaurants, beer.

[Kim]

I mean, we have a whole podcast on this.

[Amanda]

We do, we do, but the list keeps coming. Paper napkins.

[Kim]

Yeah. Uh huh.

[Amanda]

Department stores, ironing, marriage. Also divorce, hotels, mayonnaise. I didn't know about that one. And canned tuna. What these millennials killed, blank pieces were really showing, even if they weren't telling it, is that millennials were in both a unique financial situation, which was that it was far worse than the financial situation of their parents at that age. And millennials had different tastes for things.

[Kim]

I mean, it was the disruption decade and it's the disruption group of people. Everyone wanted to kind of disrupt what was pre existing, like mayonnaise and paper napkins.

[Amanda]

And we also just have this generation of people who have graduated out into this economy that sucks. They're wildly underemployed. Even though they might be working 40 or 60 or 80 hours a week, they're still underemployed. This is like a very educated generation that has a lot more thoughtfulness and awareness about what they're doing now. Of course, I would call millennials the fast fashion generation as well. So it's not like millennials were these saints or anything like that, but they came into the world, into an adult world that was just like so weird and so different than the world of our parents, for sure. In general, many people were continuing to struggle financially, not just millennials, but secondhand shopping as a mainstream way of life wasn't a big trend anymore. At least in the beginning of the decade. People had other affordable options out there. They had off price retailers which we talked about in the last episode. You know, your, your Nordstrom racks, your Marshalls, your TJ Maxx kind of places. They had fast fashion brands which like thrift stores couldn't even really compete with some of those prices. I specifically remember Forever 21 sold tank for $1.80. And I don't think a thrift store could meet that pricing. And there were dollar stores. Dollar stores were like exploding at this time. This was also the golden era of calling Target Tarjay, right? And Target was an affordable destination for design driven home goods and clothing.

[Kim]

Oh, and they were doing collaborations everywhere. And everyone was doing the high, low collaborations so you could get like Karl Lager for at H M or something for a fraction of the price.

[Amanda]

Everyone was doing it. Everyone was doing it. And people, like I said, they were getting really into dollar stores. And much like thrifting in the 70s and the 80s, it wasn't just low income people shopping at dollar stores kind of for like the first time ever. I read this 2011 New York Times article called the Dollar Store Economy and I actually read this a couple years ago, but brought it back for this one. And I'm gonna link to this in the show notes. I highly recommend you read Fascinating how a place like say the Dollar Tree is, you know, designed, merchandised, you know, the product assortment, all of it. It's so intentional to get people to impulse shop.

[Kim]

Ooh, do tell.

[Amanda]

So fascinating. Like even just that, like they make the aisles a little bit narrower and they offer carts even though these aren't these big stores and the idea is to just get you to keep on moving and dumping stuff in your cart without really fascinating. Go check it out. I mean just how the height of the displays, everything they think about it all. It's definitely capitalism at its strategic worst, if you will. I really loved this section from this article. The writer writes we are awakening to a dollar store economy. For years, the dollar store has not only made a market out of the, sorry, the detritus. I love that word by the way of a hyper productive global manufacturing system has also made it appealing by making it amazingly cheap. Before the market meltdown of 2008 and the stagnant jobless recovery that followed, the conventional wisdom about dollar stores, whether one of the three big corporate chains, Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree or any of the smaller chains like 99 cent only stores, which they totally have in LA or the world of independent dollar stores, was that they appeal to only poor people. And while it's true that low wage earners still make up the core of dollar store customers, what has turned this sector into a nearly recession proof corner of the economy is a new customer base. What's driving the growth, says James Russo, a vice president with the Nielsen Company, a consumer survey firm, is affluent households. Financial anxiety or the new consumerism, if you like, has been a boon to dollar stores. Same store SA sales, a key measure of a retailer's health, spiked at the three large publicly traded chains in this year's first quarter. All were up by at least 5%, while Walmart had its eighth straight quarterly decline. Much of Dollar General's growth is generated by fill in trips increasingly made by wealthier people. Why linger in the canyons of Walmart or Target when you can pop into a dollar store? I do remember like lots of blogs. We're gonna talk about blogs so much today. And I hadn't really like said or typed that word in a really long time. And it's like hilarious the word blog. But there were I remember in this period more and more of these blogs were popping up to say like here are all these amazing crafts you can make from stuff from the dollar store. Or like here's how I threw a party, only with stuff from the dollar Store. And you know, it was the same kind of thing as like, like, look at me, my outfit is head to toe from Target. You know, that kind of stuff. Like there was a lot of blogging about fashion, which we're gonna talk about at length today. But there's also a lot of blogging about like, look at how you can make amazing things out of inexpensive stuff. Like this was a trend of this time.

[Kim]

I feel like a lot of people kind of realize that the product at like the dollar store or any of the dollar stores was the same quality and probably made in many of the same factories as product that you can get in like Target or Wal or even like further up the chain. So it's like, well, you know, it doesn't really matter where I shop. I can just get the exact same thing at one of these places.

[Amanda]

Totally, totally. I think people were starting to be wise to that. I mean, you and I know that even in the realm of clothing, most of the clothing is coming from the same factories.

[Kim]

You know, even the same, like we talked about it, the apparel, the downtown, what is it, the downtown center, San Pedro Apparel Mart, where that was being sold in hot end retailers that are just marking the same stuff up or just white labeling the product. But it's the same thing that you could find at just basically the, the equivalent of a dollar retailer down the street.

[Amanda]

Absolutely, yeah. It is called kind of the same. I mean, and I'm going to tell you this might blow some minds here, but the stuff at Target is probably being made in the same place as the stuff at Walmart, which is the same stuff as the stuff that's at the Dollar Tree, which in many aspects is probably the same stuff at Bed Bath and Beyond. You know.

[Kim]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Amanda]

So overall, just in the 2000 and tens, customers had so many other affordable options for shopping. And the rise of E commerce made shopping for inexpensive things even easier. By the middle of the decade, Amazon offered the lowest prices on just about anything. And every fast fashion retailer was building a bigger and better website. Another thing that was just sort of killing the appeal of secondhand shopping is something that I hesitate to talk about because it horrifies me. It's nightmare fuel for many of us. The golden era of bedbug fear pieces.

[Kim]

Oh my God, that's right. Because I used to live in New York around that time and everyone was terrified of bedbugs. Cause it was a giant nightmare, obviously.

[Amanda]

Yeah, yeah. And it was like there was. I remember there was a piece on this American Life about a Woman's struggles with bedbugs that, like, horrified me. And they were popping up in magazines all over the place. Lots of things that I would read. It would be like my nightmare year with bedbugs. I remember a friend of mine, he had bedbugs in his building. I will not reveal his name here because it was horrific for him. And, like, I wanted to help him, but I was also like, should I even let him in my car? Like, is this because we were all afraid, right? We were all like, oh my God, it could be us next. And it didn't help that there was a lot of conversation, a lot of articles, blog posts about how you could get bedbugs secondhand shopping, you know, And I literally found an article in the New York Times that was specifically about the dangers of catching bedbugs from thrifting or shopping secondhand. And I think in many ways they. They kind of. I don't dismiss that notion, but they didn't do a great. They didn't do a great job of it. I'll link to the article in the show notes and you can tell me what you think. But from this article, I have a few quotes here. In a summer when bedbugs have crawled deep into New York City's psyche, no one is anxious than those shoppers who live to scout secondhand clothing shops and used furniture stores. They are caught on a sewers of what is hot, hip, a bargain. They know where the flea markets are and when the vintage shops are open. And they are scared that bedbugs from the home of a former owner still call that $20 designer jacket or that fabulous $65 chair their castle. Like, geez, guys, okay, we won't shop secondhand. The article goes on. I liked this little n. In the spring, the first question from a student at a Fashion Institute of Technology course called Is Vintage for your? Was, have you ever experienced any issues with bedbugs? Wow.

[Kim]

I mean, that actually really makes a lot of sense.

[Amanda]

It does.

[Kim]

How those two.

[Amanda]

Yeah, those.

[Kim]

Those two elements that were like, deep seated in the consumer conscious would really affect the sales. I mean, that makes so much sense.

[Amanda]

So you're worrying about bedbugs. I mean, I remember people would say to me, like, what you got that wear? Aren't you worried about bedbugs? And I would be like, not, not really, you know, but. But like, there was a lot of fear about it. It came up in conversations a lot, you know, despite all these fears of bedbugs, all of these cheaper places to shop, the idea of mixing high, low Fashion with vintage was picking up momentum. In fact, successfully pulling off this mix was considered the peak of fashion and personal style. And ultimately this mix, this idea of high, low and vintage blended together. It kind of democratized fashion. I mean, with the caveat that it only sort of did, it didn't still apply to everyone because, you know, there are a lot of other, I don't know, negative factors in this world that prevent people from being allowed to participate in these things, right? Like anti fat bias, racism, sexism, transphobia, all these other things that prevented everybody from being able to participate in this. But it did make it feel as if just about anyone could become a style icon. A lot of this desire to mix things up was actually led by the rise of street style photography, which I just like, I don't know, I can't even explain it, Kim. It's just been around for so long, I was like, oh, oh, this is when that happened, you know? Yes, right. I read, I've read so many articles over the past week about just like what were the fashion Trends in the 2010s and the Audis. And I read this one retrospective from Womenswear Daily where they said street style photography has long been a part of fashion Week. But the phenomenon gained prestige and ubiquity in the 2010s thanks to the proliferation of social media. These street style images circulated on fashion blogs, websites and Instagram, more so than actual Runway looks, spawning a budding class of influencers that today are industry powerhouses. The dawn of the street style star can be credited in large part to the late New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, Cunningham was a fixture on the streets of New York, but he became a celebrity in his own right with a documentary about his work which was released in 2011. The decade also saw the rise of other street style photographers, including Scott Schumann and Tommy Ton, who gave a platform to the self styled fashion bloggers and put on display their wildly acclaimed authentic style. We also had the sartorialist Style Bites was one that I really loved and was obsessed with. It was a woman who lived, I want to say, in Sweden because she wore a lot of H and M and she actually had such a rabid international fan base that when she disappeared a few years into it, people were legitimately concerned and she kind of popped up a couple years later and said, yeah, I just didn't want to do it anymore. But people were worried that she'd been like kidnapped, murdered, had gotten ill. She just disappeared. She never said, I'm going to stop Posting. She just stopped posting on style like we do. People were concerned. Like we do. Yeah. There was advanced style, which I always love. Older people.

[Kim]

That was. Yeah, that was a friend of a friend who produces that.

[Amanda]

Oh, wow. One of my favorites, honestly. So are there any favorite street style blogs of that era that you remember or miss or that you checked regularly?

[Kim]

I mean, I love the Tommy Todd ones. That's the way that's what I was really following was, you know, because that. That really gave you that. That access that you couldn't really see to the actual style trends, you know, because Runway style's one thing, but it's different. But like, yeah, street style is like, the actual execution and achievement of. Of something you can actually wear around and how the people kind of actually dress. And so especially when you were looking at, like, international street style.

[Amanda]

Oh, my gosh.

[Kim]

And street fashion, that was. That was the best. And of course, we had to develop style boards and training boards always, all of those things constantly. So you had to find resources that felt innovative but also cutting edge.

[Amanda]

Definitely, Definitely. I remember specifically, like, in their early odys, when I was working as a buyer at Urban Outfitters, that was the period where we were really looking to Scandinavian style bloggers.

[Kim]

Yes, yes, exactly. That was. That was the. That was the hot area.

[Amanda]

Yeah, yeah, that was like, people would go on trips there for scouting. I fought. I had, like, you know, how you could, like. I don't even remember what this was called. It was like an RSS feed where you would put in all the blogs that you followed, and then you could see the updates every day. I mean, my list was like a million long. And the first thing I would do when I got into the office every morning was open that and go one by one. And so many of them were Scandinavian. We also can't forget the Tumblr of it all. This is a big part of this era, too. It allowed anyone to put together their own blog of style art and aesthetic and trends were actually created within Tumblr. And that was another one that I would say around maybe closer to 2013, 2012, I was starting to look at Tumblr regularly. Also more to predict trends, you know, and, like, what's coming for people. Like, oh, now they want to do this, like, pastel goth thing. Now it's about this soft girl aesthetic, you know, on and on and on. Tumblr in itself is really fascinating to me. And I actually, as I was working on this, I thought, oh, it might be fun to do an episode sometime in the Next couple months be a nostalgic trend episode, specifically about all of the trends that Tumblr created in the 2010s.

[Kim]

Yeah, I would love that.

[Amanda]

Be fun, right? Absolutely. We also see the rise of the original style blogger influencers. We get man repeller, Blonde Salad, Song of Style, Something Navy style bubble, which was like my favorite Suzy Bubble. Um, I suppose we probably got Danielle Bernstein coming up at this point. You know, we were what. I'm sure I missed some other memorable people here, but I'm just gonna be really honest and say, like, I haven't really ever been into influencers. Like, it's just I don't really follow them. I'll look at them for work sometimes. But a lot of the places I've worked have been a lot more, like, cutting edge in terms of where we were with trends. And so a lot of these more like mainstream influencers, we weren't really interested. But I do remember specifically, and I know we've brought this up on here before, Kim, that when we were at Nasty Gal, there was one influencer who we followed pretty closely. Oh, Kim Kardashian.

[Kim]

Yes. And I remember when I got there, I was like, oh, no, now I have to follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram. And I was like, oh, this is just awful, man.

[Amanda]

The Kardashians, like, that was the fit for Nasty Gal. You know, I mean, we had a lot of different customers, but I would say the heart of our customer really loved Kim Kardashian.

[Kim]

I mean, it was like the Sex and the City of Thoughts. Like, you had to just. Just watch what they were wearing, and you would immediately have to just buy into whatever it was you would. Something kind of new or different. It's like, oh, okay, so these, like, over the knee, lace up, like, impossible to wear stilettos are. Are in. I know I have to wear these and. Or buy these. And of course, they would sell right out.

[Amanda]

Yeah, yeah, Weird. Like ribbed bandage dresses and lots of, like, beige.

[Kim]

Lots of beige. You know, I remember beige was always a really hard sell. Any sort of, like, skin tone color was just real. Until the Kardashians came along.

[Amanda]

It's true. And then we were selling that more than black at Nasty Gal in certain styles. It was really wild. It's very chic. Or like, Heather gray is another one that is, like, really hard to sell. But in that Kardashian era of, like, 2015, that was another one like, oh, a crop top and a. A mini in. In, you know, Heather athletic gray rib sold like it's so bizarre. And that was an influence. Like, you know, I think people forget that Kim Kardashian was an influencer. You know, this was also the era of the celebrity stylist, like as in the stylist styled celebrities, but was also a celebrity themselves, right? There were so many of them, like Rachel Zo, for example. And some of the best known stylists would mix vintage with big labels and also small cult brands to dress their clients. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian began wearing vintage couture on the red carpet. This was like a new thing to wear a secondhand dress on the red carpet. Like what? You know, every year when we talk about the Oscars and awards season. And by the way, like, I'm very disconnected from all this stuff at this point, but you know, there was a time where it'd be like, oh my God, gotta go get the magazine right away and see what everyone wore to the Oscars because that's going to be somehow directional for this year. Or like, look at the blog posts, right? And we definitely, at Nasty Gal would go through some of these and say like, okay, how can we make that? What, how can we interpret that? Like we, we really paid attention to that. But the thing is like, you would be waiting to see who dressed them and it would be this like one, one after another, like brand new, specially designed for this event, designer dresses, right? And suddenly we have big mainstream stars wearing vintage on the red carpet. So seeing these mainstream megastars, like, I'm telling you, Gwyneth Paltrow, Miley Cyrus, that looks like a. Right there, the Olsens always showing up.

[Kim]

She's got some photos to, you know, to review. That's what we're like.

[Amanda]

That's what I'm looking at. Natalie Portman, I mean, like the biggest stars of this era showing up in vintage gowns. This really elevated vintage to the status of luxury, you know. And so high end boutiques began mixing vintage in with new stuff. And hip retailers like Nasty Gal got in on it by doing regular drops of high priced vintage. Like we, you know, I never cease to be amazed how the fast the vintage would sell on the Nasty Gal website because, you know, most of our clothes were under $100, most of our dresses were like $58. We do a drop of vintage where it would be like $800 jackets and vintage Chanel purses and $300 rock tees and it would all sell out like in one day. That's right.

[Kim]

I almost forgot about that. I mean, I know that There was a lot of product that was kind of. It was like made, made, remade from.

[Amanda]

Like upcycled after party, after party, but. Right.

[Kim]

The vintage drops.

[Amanda]

The first time I worked there and we did that and I was looking at the page, I was like, wait, this can't be the same customer. You know, knowing how resistant our customer was to pricing overall and then to see it all sold by the end of that day, it was pretty interesting. And I suspect it was a different customer. That's what I think. Um, but secondhand luxury items also began to pick up momentum as an aspirational aesthetic choice. Like, why go buy a new Chanel bag when you could say that yours was vintage, you know, and it wouldn't necessarily even be cheaper. It was just like an aesthetic choice. And I don't know, I'm sure you're familiar with that high end vintage show, A Current Affair, which happens in LA and I think in San Francisco also.

[Kim]

Absolutely.

[Amanda]

It was founded in 2010. Like this is the decade I did not that. And we're talking like high end prices. You know, it wasn't the flea market. So we just see people being more willing to pay a lot for vintage. But we're also speaking of a wealthier customer buying this stuff, whereas like more middle income, lower income people, they're going to be buying stuff at the dollar store, at Target or from fast fashion retailers or, you know, maybe thrift. But more than any other era, fashion, like the mainstream fashion industry, retailers and brands, they were leaning heavily into vintage, both literally by having sections in their store or on their website for vintage items, but also in more of a like knockoff sort of way. There were so many style Trends in the 2010s that relied heavily, I mean, well, really completely on vintage aesthetic and style. We got Normcore, for example, which was really a vintage 90s look a la, you know, Jerry Seinfeld. Right. We've got Festival Fashion, which launched just like big time boho, like brands that only sold the boho festival look 365 days a year. You know, people would describe their aesthetic as boho, right?

[Kim]

Yes.

[Amanda]

Then we get 1990s grunge and unisex dressing making a return. I mean, even at Nasty, we did a collab with Courtney Love, you know, and by the way, that collab primarily was things we borrowed from her closet and turned into new Items in the second half of the 2010s, starting when we were in the Nasty Gal era of our careers. 70s became a trend again. So we've got all kinds of Decades swimming around here.

[Kim]

And.

[Amanda]

And you might not be surprised to hear that in that decade, specifically later in the after Donald Trump era, nostalgia became a very big deal. According to Google, nostalgia was the biggest fashion trend of 2018. Harper's Bazaar says it raises questions in my mind about whether we are more unhappy with the present time than usual. I feel that one. Exactly. That quote came from Sarah Rose Kavanaugh, who's the director of the Laboratory for Cognitive and Effective Science at Assumption College. She said, we feel nostalgic for times in our past that we long to return to, at least temporarily. Could it be that more than usual, we feel ourselves pulled backward to a time of our lives when things felt simply more connected and less divided? This was in 2018, my friends. You don't even know how nostalgic we're gonna get in a few years.

[Kim]

It's gonna be, like, the biggest driving force of, like, a decade. I know, which actually is interesting because, you know, we always see that pendulum swimming, swinging, you know, where nostalgia will become. Will be this huge, huge, huge trend. And it just exists in a way that just feels like it's timeless, but it's going to swing back the other way to the opposite direction at some point. We know that we're going to start.

[Amanda]

At some point, and it's going to.

[Kim]

Be all about futurism.

[Amanda]

Definitely. Definitely. I mean, even when I look at the first part of the 2010s, which we're going to talk about in a few, there wasn't really a sense of nostalgia at that point. It was all about living in that moment and this, like, new way forward of millennials killing all the things while they did it.

[Kim]

Well, yeah, and also, nobody wanted to look back on the aughts. Nobody wanted to look back on what existed. Like, it was kind of like, oh, everyone was sick of it and they just wanted something completely different.

[Amanda]

Definitely, Definitely. We saw all the biggest brands of the aughts just die immediately. When we came into the 2010s, like, it was like, nobody wants Ed Hardy. Nobody wants Juicy. You know, I could go on and on. Uggs von Dutch. Yeah, Uggs all, you name it. Like, gone. And just, like, don't even speak their name, you know. How embarrassing, right? And it's not unlike, you know, like, in the 80s when everybody was like, oh, God, the 70s, we can never speak of it again. And then in the 90s, everybody's like, ew, gross. Get the 80s out of here. And I think, like, eventually this nostalgia is gonna end. It's like hard to see that time right now. But eventually we will. Eventually we will. So the four. The top four fashion searches according to Google in 2018 were 1980s fashion, grunge fashion, 1990s fashion, and I don't know who was searching for this, but 2000s fashion, by the way, the number one searched brand, fashion, brand that year, 2018. I mean, this kind of takes me back to fashion. Yeah, yeah. Never hear about them anymore.

[Kim]

I just. I just don't think you run in those circles. I'm sure that they're. They're doing fine.

[Amanda]

I have this. I still laugh when I think about this. This very visceral memory of it being 2020, like one month into the pandemic, and you and I were on the phone for, like, hours, and all we were doing was looking at Fashion Nova's.

[Kim]

Instagram, but looking at what people tagged themselves in.

[Amanda]

Yeah, yeah. Because we were just like, this is not us, you know, and it was very illuminating. But even I think a lot of that is, like, very dated now. Right. So stuff does change. Fashion Nova was definitely not nostalgic. You know, like, it was like a forward view of fashion that didn't really pull from the past as much as other brands will were at that point. I'll just say that fashion of the 2000 and tens kind of began to take on this overall look of maximal nostalgia. Yeah, it was kind of like a hipster thing to do. But millennials in general were used to being accused of being narcissistic hipsters at this point, they were also getting very accustomed to being accused of killing the Olive Garden, so they didn't really push back on that. If you're aching for some near recent nostalgia, I highly recommend checking out this article from called McQueen Skulls and Mulberry Alexas. An introduction to early 2010 style and what it really made me see as a person who lived through this is the first couple years of the Audis had a very distinct look from the rest of the decade. And I think that's pretty normal. We see it being a lot darker in the beginning, and it gets a lot more. More maximalist as the decade progresses. Or minimalist, depending on what was your thing. Right. But for the purpose of secondhand, we're primarily going to be talking about the maximalist side of it because they are very linked. So indie sleaze and ironic hipsterism were beginning to evolve and shift into something new. And I think we were probably all really glad to see that go. I know I was. We know that indie sleaze was Gross. Gross at its core. And the irony of hipsterism in the aughts is that all of the irony wasn't actually that funny at all and was just like subconscious, or not even subconscious racism and sexism. Right? But the early 2010s were the era of LEDAs, right? The iconic Jeffrey Campbell shoe. Love them. Ready for them to come back. I guess I'm nostalgic for those shoes. They were so comfortable and they made me like six feet tall. Tall scarves. Oh, my God, Kim. I had like, buried scarves deep away into my brain because I had to buy so many of them at Urban Outfitters. But everything I looked at for. From this period.

[Kim]

Scarf.

[Amanda]

Scarves, scarves, scarves. Scarves of all sorts. Yeah, so many scarves. Skinny jeans. This is like skinny jeans in its prime, right? All the stuff we talked about in the aughts episodes, but kind of like transforming as people were like, get me away from that. Like, we see, for example, I'm sure you remember this, how shirts were really long in the aughts, I think because the jeans were low rise.

[Kim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a.

[Amanda]

Right. We see the crop top. Now it's like that. Crop tops, right? So we start to see this stuff shift. What we really start to see is a trend toward this maximal nostalgia aesthetic. And it starts in a small way, but it becomes bigger and more important by the end of the decade, setting the stage, really, for those wild festival looks, which, by the way, we're totally going to talk about festival in a future episode, because it's been on our minds. Heavy duty pattern mixing, the return of 70s maximalism and conversely, the intentional blandness of normcore as a counterpoint. Also. Also minimalism, right? So kind of more than ever in the 2000 and tens, we start to see so many more micro trends in fashion, and we see a lot more sort of like different groups based on aesthetic that I think has picked up a lot of momentum in the TikTok era. Like, we have way more of these small subsets, these aesthetics, but we start to see that happening in the 2010s. And I really. It's become because of social media, you know, it's because of Tumblr and style blogs. And just suddenly we have people taking everything that's out there in the world and blending it all together to create their own specific thing. So from that same ID article, where it kind of tells us what's happening in the early 2010s, it hints at. There's this other, other aesthetic that's starting to emerge, the article says. On the other side of town, thrifting for vintage clothes became commonplace for a more jobless youth ukulele busking look. Williamsburg and Brick Lane offering two sides of the same coin. But unlike today, a time in which most of us are in search of cult designer items, the 2010s were marked by a more innocent quest for sartorial classics like 40s style tea dresses, old furs, beaten up leather jackets, and classic Americana denim boots and fringe suede and just good old fashioned clothes. The idea was to throw it together with the ease of Alexa Chung or Florida Florence Welsh, pairing it with a floppy hat and laddered tights, maybe a pair of brogues. Oh, my God, I can picture all of this. Voila. There was also a kitsch rockabilly moment, which we cannot forget about. I forgot about it until I read this and I was like, oh, right. Think of anything. Polka dot emblazoned with cherries, beehives, and lots of eyeliner, a la Amy Winehouse. Sleaze meets twee. What brings all of these girls together, though, is that they can tell you where they were when they first discovered the work of Meadam Kerchoff, the now defunct iconic London label that served latter day riot. Girls, look it up. If you're going to want anything, anything from the decade, at least make it a veritable piece of fashion history. So this, like, this really painted a picture for me. I was thinking about, like, Lily Allen also dressed a little bit like that, that nostalgic rockabilly kind of thing. Uh, we're starting to see, like, freak folk. Remember that? Like the Devenger Banhart kind of.

[Kim]

Oh, my God, you really are taking me back.

[Amanda]

Yeah. So this is like a fringe thing, but as the decade progresses, we see that aesthetic as well, which is very like 60s, 70s bohemian, becoming more mainstream too, but, like, in a very distressed way, really. Built, built off of wearing secondhand clothing. Over time, as I mentioned, this evolved into what we commonly refer to as festival aesthetic.

[Kim]

There it is.

[Amanda]

Right, right. And then the more maximalist style blogger look that we now call cluttercore. I don't know if you've heard that term.

[Kim]

Yeah, I have, but I don't actually know what it means.

[Amanda]

Well, don't worry because I'm going to talk about it. Cluttercore is coming back. I suspect this means that the boho festival look could be back too. I don't know, I think it might be too soon for that one. I was looking at some Coachella photos this week, and I did feel like people were dressing a little bit differently than they had in the past at Coachella. Another article that filled me with a ton of nostalgia and kind of excitement for the future is this Hot off the presses? Well, at least like a month ago Hot off the press article from Refinery29. And I can't remember the last time I got excited reading a Refinery 29 article or even just read a Refinery 29 article in the first place. But this one was called clutter why the 2010's blogger aesthetic is back in Style it says Tumblr kids in fishnet tights and scuffed doc Martens established their scuzzy soft grunge aesthetic. Meanwhile, fashion bloggers with Lookbook Nu Remember that one?

[Kim]

That was where you could find a lot of the Scandinavian accounts.

[Amanda]

You what? Yep. Oh yep. They would post fit pics and skinny jeans, camel coats and heeled ankle boots. Elsewhere in the blogosphere, teenagers rummaged in their closets to try and recreate avant garde Runway looks or scoured thrift stores for originals 1960s shift dresses to pair with clashing knee highs. That brings us to clutter Core. Here it was in shape, sharp contrast to the skinny jeans and the all black chic of the early 2000 and tens. This is like the anti indie sleaze again from Refinery 29. These bloggers and their contemporaries cultivated an anti minimalist clutter core fashion aesthetic characterized by rainbow hues, mismatched textures and a studied interest in vintage style. Celebrities like Elle Fanny, Florence Welch and Alexa Chung were also known for dressing in this chaotic twee adjacent style at the time, while established fashion faces like Iris Apple and Anna Della Russo were often credited as credited as formative influences. At the same time, popular blogging platform blogger RIP counted more than 2 million blogs related to fashion on their platform alone. Among these were diary like personal style blogs that mixed backyard self timer outfit portraits with fashion commentary, life updates, vintage mood boards, scans of scrapbooks and film stills. The outfits themselves were experimental, involving lots of layering and a mixing of different vintage eras. And I shared some photos with you here. Kim, we've got Tavi. Do you say your is her last name Gevinson or Jevons? Sorry everyone if I got it wrong. Anyway, the founder of Rookie Mac, there are pictures of her here. She has to be like 13 or something. Incredible clutter Core look here. Susie Bubble of Style Bubble, another icon. These looks actually look very fresh to me right now and they remind me of one of the TikTok aesthetics that you talked about a couple months ago, which I think was it like, like freak core or something like that?

[Kim]

That's exactly what I was thinking. I was like, what was that one called? I think it's very similar. I think it's basically the same.

[Amanda]

It's basically the same, but for a new generation, I guess. And it really is just about mixing color and texture and pattern and not really thinking too much about the price of the clothes you're selling or if the eras go together, just like throwing it all in a blender, which in a time of nostalgia, nostalgia is like really imperative. And thinking about how as we get into the late Audies, everybody's like, I'm nostalgic for the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and the aughts. Let's just throw it all in here. That's what you get, right? So this combination of style bloggers and Tumblr aesthetic and the sheer volume of trends that involved vintage aesthetic in one way or another led to an increase in thrifting among the young in style forward. And it actually really made thrifting second nature for Gen Z. We weren't quite in the era of online secondhand shopping, and that wouldn't get as big as it is now until this decade. But Depop and Poshmark did launch early in the decade. Most vintage shoppers were actually hitting up like actual real life stores, flea markets. I remember it became like a cool thing to go to the Rose bowl flea market, for example, and blog about it, right? Uh, they would go to thrift stores. They would also buy stuff online on ebay and now Etsy, because Etsy had expanded to offering vintage clothing as well. And what was interesting about this time period, and it's going to surprise anyone, based on what we've been talking about, you know, in previous decades that we've talked about, there would be a specific time period that was the most sought after, right? So in the 80s it was the 50s, and in the 90s it was the 70s. In this time period, people are like, whatever, Whatever I find is fine. Any era, any decade. The most stylish people were actually taking things from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s and the 90s and anything before or after and wearing it together.

[Kim]

I mean, still, you have a lot of really good decades to choose from. I think this is the first time we actually had, you know, a really, a good, you know, a good what, 40 or 50 years of really cool style to choose from. I mean, you know, of course, like the runways were also influencing a lot of this too, with like gucci basically just doing a 180 on the minimalism and going really deep into this like, really like luxe, you know, 70s look that everybody wanted.

[Amanda]

Everybody was doing that. I remember specifically all the stuff we were working on at Nasty gal for like six months straight was that luxe 70s look. And it came right from the Runway and it was like, I, I mean, I remember thinking like, this is so fresh. Because the kind of 70s that we were Weari in the 90s was not that 70s, right? It was more like polyestery and like brightly colored and ironic T shirts. This was like a totally different level of it.

[Kim]

Very polished, very like disco ready. Because disco, I mean, for such a long time had had such like negative.

[Amanda]

Connotations around it, which is just ridiculous because disco rules. Love disco. Well, here's the thing is like, everybody's like getting really into all of these vintage aesthetics, mixing them up together or being more purist and being like, I'm only doing luxe 70s disco, what have you. Thrifting isn't for everyone. And so retailers really wanted to get in on all of these big trends from this decade, no matter how small or niche they were. Because this is the fast fashion era. And the goal of fast fashion, the business model, is to sell people as much stuff as possible. Possible as often as possible. And that means you gotta buy into everything, right? You have to. No matter how small the trend is or how weird it seems. You as a buyer in that time period were like, I gotta get into all of it. So everywhere I worked, we'd be chasing into like six, seven different trends at any given time. And some of them were very short lived. Some of them went on for a long time. And we saw like festival as a trend even, you know, and so we were. There was just so much of this out there. And if you, if you see a bunch of people wearing secondhand clothes, that's not really helping the fast fashion industry, right? You got to get people to buy new stuff. So it became very common for buyers and designers to have massive sample budgets for purchasing vintage garments to copy. Right? It was just par for the course of my career. We would do this all the time. I would say the only place that I worked that we didn't do that was Wildfang. And that was just like a different aesthetic. But, but like everywhere else I worked, we were buying very expensive vintage samples and copying them. Nasty Gal was an extreme example. I remember we had like a vault of vintage that I can't even imagine what it was valued at. Because they would travel around and drop major cash on, like, vintage couture to copy. This definitely drove up the price of vintage on the market because retailers had a much higher shopping budget, less price resistance than your average shopper. So this is when we start to see prices really escalating in the vintage realm. Because you're at the Rose bowl and you're selling that jacket for $500, no problem. Some buyer is going to swoop in and buy it. And I can say that because I went on trips like that where I went to the Rose bowl or I went to vintage shops and I bought really expensive pieces for us to copy. The weird, weird challenge of it all, this idea of, like, we're gonna copy vintage stuff is that how do you turn an extremely well made, high quality vintage garment that probably has a ton of detail into a $58 dress in 2016? And I just want to say, Kim, when we were at Nasty Gal, I'm jealous that you got to work on shoes, because in the apparel realm, that was the puzzle we were trying to solve every week.

[Kim]

How to reduce the cost, how to, like, make cut corners and cut zippers, change out the fabric, reduce, reduce seams, all of those little things. I remember when I was in design school, we had a project where it was like, okay, here's something really amazing. Now make it more affordable. And I was like this.

[Amanda]

Wow. I mean, that was like setting you up. Yeah, that's like important career knowledge. So, like, at Nasty Gal, you know, we had an in house design team, and they were all super duper talented, but definitely our leadership was really pushing for two things for our in house product. One, copying stuff from the Runway. Okay, good luck doing that and hitting a price point. Right. And two, copying vintage. So we would go into, like, the first sort of like, sketch review, where the wall would just be hung with vintage samples and pictures printed out of Runway stuff. And it'd be like, which of these things are you guys interested in? Well, of course we're interested in all of it, because it's fucking amazing. So then the samples come, and they're shitty.

[Kim]

So disappointing.

[Amanda]

They're still so disappointing. And there's still two to three times what we can cost. We can afford. Like, it's just. And this was happening in every retailer out there at this point. If they weren't doing that, they were buying stuff from people who had copied that stuff and then copying it. That being like, okay, they already did the work. We'll just make this right.

[Kim]

Exactly, exactly.

[Amanda]

And so I will say that despite all those challenges, the 2010s were the most success that retailers have ever had in turning vintage into new clothing. We had seen it fail in the 1970s. It would occasionally work in the 80s, but only if it was like that 50s aesthetic. And it still had to just like really hit the right note. It picked up momentum in the 90s for sure. And we saw especially like more youth oriented retailers like Delia's or Urban Outfitters really successfully copying the 70s. But I will say what was easy about that is that this kind of stuff that they were copying was not going to be like really expensive to begin with, right? And so it was easier to copy it and have it hit the right note without like 5000 sample reviews where people are like crying with frustration. It really became a very successful business model in the 2010s to copy vintage into fast fashion. The irony is not lost on me that the vintage of the past was used to create near future garbage, as it's hard to imagine many of these clothes created in the 2010will survive long enough to become true vintage. It's very sad.

[Kim]

It is sad.

[Amanda]

Sorry, I ended it all on a sad note, everyone.

[Kim]

Well, and of course, you know, the trend continues. You know, it doesn't just stop here at the Audis, but we don't really need to talk about it because we're living it.

[Amanda]

We're living it right now. And so, like, where are we right now? Well, one, it is easier than ever to shop secondhand, right? Thanks to online shopping, we've got Depop, we got Poshmark, we got Vinted and Merari, and we also still have ebay and Etsy. And then we have the real real. And we have vintage sellers selling on their own websites or on Instagram directly. We have people auctioning, like having live sales on Instagram. I mean, if you had told me like five years ago that was going to become a thing. First off, it's basically like a modernized version of qvc. And I love it. You know, I think it's so cool. I love watching people's live sales. I can't explain it. I understand now why people fall prey to qvc because they feel less lonely or something. And in the early days of the pandemic, I would watch like every live sale on Instagram, even if I didn't buy anything, just because it was like you felt like you were listening to other people talk about things. And so we have seen shopping secondhand become more accessible. We have seen more people who never did it in the past opting for it. And of course we've seen that people love to fight about it on the Internet.

[Kim]

I know that you've been doing some series based on something sort of similar over at Clothes Horse. Has there been a lot of infighting happening?

[Amanda]

You know, overall I think it's been pretty good so far. And I hesitate to say that because I was telling Dustin last week I was like, this series I think has a very long tail in terms of the people who are going to be listening to it and participating in it. It's already been, it's already reached a lot of people, but I see more and more people coming into the fold after listening to it, which is really exciting. So that means there could be future drama for sure. But I will say there was someone who accused me of participating and, or encouraging genocide, which I think was a bit heavy handed use of that term. Wow. Yeah. And there was a wild situation last week where I guess apparently that the conversations about pricing and accessibility to vintage clothing, specifically not secondhand but vintage, has been quite, quite a heated topic on the vintage to the vintage community in, on Instagram. So there's been a lot of heated conversation. People who are like, there's price gouging. I mean, I have a lot of opinions there. Like one of the examples I saw was a dress, like a suit from the 1940s that someone was offering like asking $600 for. And while that's out of my price range, we're also talking about clothes that are close to 100 years old that probably should be in a museum at this point. So I can see both sides of it. I can see that that's frustrating if that's your style. So there's been a lot of conversations about the ethics around that price gouging. I mean, listen, I would love to pull all these people aside individually and teach them about the art of pricing and perceived value, which you and I know a ton about. The long story short is the price is more than just how much you paid for to make it right or like, or to source it. I guess in the vintage world it's like what people are will to pay for it. You know, that's what the real price.

[Kim]

Is and what sort of value comes along with it. Not just value and like dressing yourselves but you know, even just like the limited quantity or the exclusivity of being so old or you know, like the, where they even found it. I mean, who knows how much they paid for it originally.

[Amanda]

Yeah, yeah. I mean vintage, we talk about like Secondhand clothing in general, like the price is so much more complicated than what the seller paid for it and what it cost them to like clean it, ship it to you, all that stuff. Like it's way more complicated. I mean, like we didn't talk about this in this episode because I just, I would sound like I was speaking another language because, you know, I can't even say the word dunk properly. But like sneaker heads are a great example, like where the value of the shoe is not what the person paid for it, it's what the person buying it from them thinks it's worth based on the rareness, the collectability, that kind of thing. And I think all secondhand stuff, it operates that way as well. But vintage, obviously it's even more complicated because the supply is even more limited by time. Right. And also by size even. So anyway, there's been a lot of debate about that and someone who is a pretty well known, I would say like a leader in that vintage afficianado of Instagram space shared a post I did. And. And things went off the rails really fast because someone else in that community who is very anti reseller, who, I don't know, I don't follow. I'd never been aware of them before until they decided to make me very aware of them. They thought that I made that post specifically to respond to them and which I didn't. I didn't even know that this was a hot topic on the vintage of Instagram world. I'm glad to know about it now. That person went off the rails and said that I was a Nazi. Like actually dropped some names of Nazis to compare me to.

[Kim]

Wow.

[Amanda]

That I'm trying to control the information that people get access to that I'm manipulating people they went on to, I then had to block them. But they went on and on, picking apart everything about me. This is a person I don't even know. And it was really, really upsetting and it just reminded me of what a fucked up place the Internet is sometimes. Like, I don't know this person. It's a true horror story. I know. And now I have to deal with them just like going at me over nothing, that I had nothing to do with them, you know. And then their friends started showing up and I finally to be like, hey listen, I don't know what the deal is with your friend. I don't know them. This has nothing to do with them. This is actually part of a series I've been working on for more than a month. I would urge you to go look at my other posts leading up to this or the like, I don't know, 20 hours of podcast content related to do it. Like this has nothing to do with your friend. Please tell them to go away. But that's, that's just how hot this is such a hot topic right now. It frustrates me because like, honestly there's like way bigger fish to fry in this world, you know, what do you.

[Kim]

Feel like the future, the future of.

[Amanda]

This trend is, I mean my hope and I think more and more people are coming around to this, is that secondhand will become just a normal part of day to day life. Because. Because the reality is that most of the clothes you can buy brand new right now are incredibly disappointing. They don't fit well, they don't have pockets. They're made of crappy fabrics that make you smelly. They don't last very long. You know, like I definitely remember at the peak of the like forever 21 era being at work and someone having to staple my dress clothes. You know, like this is just like how these clothes were and the early fast fashion clothes were way nicer than the ones they sell now. And I just think people are like kind of over it. Like why not just get something nicer, you know? And I think I would like to see it become more and more normal. My worry is that all of this wild anti reseller conversation that's happening, I mean it's all about like this myth of gentrification of thrift stores, which by now we've all, we've discussed this now for how many hours, Kim? Like thrift stores always wanted middle class and people with more money to come shopping there. That was their goal all along, right? So the thrift stores haven't been gentrified unless it's because the thrift stores wanted them to be. And in that case they were successful and they should pat themselves on the back, you know. But when you hear that or you hear that reselling is unethical or like steals stuff from poor people or whatever else is out there, it makes you feel like maybe you shouldn't buy secondhand clothes because you're too rich rich or too privileged or people who sell them are too unethical and you don't want to support them. And I read a lot of comments across the Internet of people being like, well, I guess I'm not supposed to shop secondhand because I'm middle class, but I don't want to buy stuff from like Amazon or Shein, so what am I supposed to do, you know, it creates this chaos, I guess, this paradox for people. I know. And it's just not fair.

[Kim]

No, it's not.

[Amanda]

It's so, so, I mean, I can.

[Kim]

Only imagine that it will become a bigger part of just the culture at large because it's been adopted by so many more people and that there's a lot less of a stigma against it. So I feel like it's just, it only has, has forward momentum, especially also the accessibility, all of those things. And hopefully all those naysayers are just in a small corner in a dark room, so somewhere, you know, I mean.

[Amanda]

It'S, it's funny to think about, like this is another one where if you told me a few years ago that people would be fighting like really intensely on the Internet about the ethics of wearing secondhand stuff, I wouldn't have believed you. I would've been like, well, what about all these other big ticket issues? Right, exactly. You know, and so hopefully people will shift into something else. I mean, we've talked about this before when we talked about trolling and like that sort of culture of bad behavior on the Internet. And I think for, for so many people, getting on a side is a way to feel like you're a part of something, to feel less lonely and lashing out can make you feel better, except for like how it really doesn't and it really negatively affects other people. I mean, having now been compared to Nazis, I felt afraid because that dehumanizes me.

[Kim]

I mean, you used to target too, because you do talk about things that are maybe a little bit divisive, but you wouldn't imagine that they'd be. Be that, that problematic that you're suddenly becoming a Nazi.

[Amanda]

I know. And I just like, I'm the least Nazi esque person around, so I think.

[Kim]

I think you need that T shirt. I'm the least Nazi esque person around.

[Amanda]

Yeah. I mean, if that person wanted to show that they literally don't know me at all, that was the best way to go about it because I'm always like, tell me your thoughts to everyone. Rather than like, you know, controlling the narrative and whatever else. And I think that person has their own stuff they need to deal with. But yeah, it sucks. It just sucks that things go there, especially when, you know, we have so many other things to worry about right now in the post Trump era.

[Kim]

Exactly. I mean, apparently all the news stations are basically blowing up and firing people that are, you know, that work, all of them.

[Amanda]

You're like, wow, I know. I mean, it's crazy. We're recording this just a few hours after Tucker Carlson got fired. And that does make me kind of want to have a shot or something, but it makes me feel, like, maybe optimistic, but then I don't know. Do you watch Succession?

[Kim]

You know, I have not watched it because I came in a little bit late. Oh, I hear it's great.

[Amanda]

I think you should watch it. And I have this article. It's a long read from Vanity Fair about Rupert Murdoch and his family and Fox News, and it's super fascinating, and it's, like, not dissimilar to Succession. That's why I asked. So I highly recommend that. Okay, well, we will be back next week, and then we're gonna take a little bit of a break. Not too long, just a few weeks, because Kim is going to Wisconsin, which we know now is the most perfect state in the United States, has a lot to offer, and I'm gonna go to Japan. So we're gonna take a little bit of time off, and we'll be back after that. Like I said, there's gonna be one more episode before then, but then a few weeks off. You know what I wanted to do that we always forget to do? I just wanted to give a little shout out to Dustin for mixing these episodes. Remember when we made the gain too high and he had to fix that constantly? And we're not talking about detergent, but there were a lot of gain problems for a few weeks there. And he also made our music, which I have heard is a highlight for many people. So I do get a little jealous because sometimes I feel like the department has better music than Clothes horse. And, I mean, I did tell Dustin that. So I might be getting a new song for Clotheshorse in the coming months.

[Kim]

Thank you, Dustin. This is Kim saying thank you.

[Amanda]

Thank you, Dustin. Sorry about the gain.

[Kim]

Sorry about the gain. I hope it's fixed.

[Amanda]

We still don't know what it is.

[Kim]

I'm sure he'll be like, no, the cane still off. He's like, I just stopped. I just had to pick my battles.

[Amanda]

Anyway, that's all for this week, and we'll talk to you all next week. Bye.