Why Hipsters Love Thrift Stores

Think Tank #120

People haven’t really changed. We’ve always wanted to be different in the exact same way.

Remember this when walking around one of the ‘gentrified’ neighborhoods of New York City, barely resisting the impulse to roll your eyes at overpriced thrift stores selling stinky old Doc Martens and patched-up ‘mom jeans’ to people with more money than they know what to do with, or scoff at outdoor flea markets selling ripped Led Zeppelin t-shirts for forty-five dollars apiece.

“I understand why someone would go to a thrift store that’s actually cheaper,” you want to say. “But the ones around here cost more than regular clothing stores! I wouldn’t even donate half this crap! Why buy someone’s stinky old garbage when you can just buy new clothes?”

I apologize, hipsters, yuppies and thrift-store lovers of all types. This is all in good fun. Actually, I gave the matter some thought, and we have a lot more in common than I originally thought.

It dawned on me at a used bookstore. I remarked to a friend, “I go crazy in used book stores. I can resist buying new books, but I always leave these places with a ton of books that I’m never gonna read.”

Her reply was, “It makes sense. You want books that no one else has.”

My stomach dropped to the floor. That’s exactly what the hipsters are doing. Sure, they’re doing it with furniture and clothes instead of books, but the concept is the same. They all want something no one else has.

“Alright,” the devil’s advocate on your shoulder might say. “But used books are cheaper than new books. You already said that you understand cheap thrift stores—it’s the overpriced ones that don’t make any sense.”

That might be true for dollar-fifty mass market paperbacks, but what about the out-of-print essay collections I’ve bought for quadruple the original price? What about the forty dollars I spent on a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics in the original Greek, just because it was cool? At least someone’s gonna wear their hundred-dollar patched-up bomber jacket. What am I doing with that thing?

Okay, so maybe this isn’t actually an earth-shattering revelation. Of course the point of wearing thrifted clothing is to look cool and be different. But it still doesn’t seem to make sense. Why do the spoiled children of rich people choose to overpay to look like they can’t afford to buy clothes when they could dress in designer clothes from head to toe if they wanted to?

Scarcity is what makes something desirable.

Let’s take it back a few hundred years. Laundry is a chore. All but the richest people have maybe two outfits that get washed infrequently and painstakingly. Having nice, clean clothes is a status symbol. No one has to think any harder than that.

Fast-forward now to the 20th century. The middle class can afford to bathe themselves, perhaps they have a washing machine in their house. Clothing is mass-produced, not handmade, meaning that most families can afford multiple outfits and there isn’t all that much of a difference in appearance between ‘rich clothes’ and ‘poor clothes.’ Still, having several closets full of clothes, having fancy designer names on one’s clothes and accessories, and being able to wear a different outfit for every occasion was a luxury for the rich.

Enter ‘fast fashion.’ Enter the age of the Internet. Now, even if you’re broke, you can buy a brand spanking new dress to wear to an occasion, return it, exchange it for a new one, rinse, and repeat, adopting the appearance of the aristocrats of yesteryear. Perhaps you can’t get away with this with luxury brands, and a designer handbag or pair of red-bottomed shoes is still a status symbol separating those who can afford it from those who can’t. People still have more disposable income than they used to. Plus, any old public school teacher or receptionist can bury themselves in credit card debt and obtain a closet full of these things.

Clothing is cheaper than it’s ever been, and even with the case of artificially-inflated designer products, the price of clothing has ceased to have much meaning. Short of getting clothes custom made, you’re not getting any piece of new clothing that’s ‘one of a kind.’ And even if you do, who’s gonna know unless you tell them? Someone can order something from Shein (or whatever other site is popular nowadays) and order a near-exact lookalike for twelve dollars.

Sure, fancy designers make new clothes and retire old ones every year. And sure, there generationally-wealthy people whose lives I’ll never be able to comprehend who won’t buy anything “off the rack” and frown on people who do. Whatever. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the ones who are a tier below, who want to be different but not too different, to have their friends comment on how cute their new dress is, but not to be able to Google it and order the exact same one.

In the age of the Internet, the only way to do this is to buy clothes that someone else bought between five and fifty years ago.

That’s how we got here. It’s a strange sign of the times, where anyone can buy anything they want within the two-day Prime shipping window besides the simplicity of the past. In this strange zeitgeist, the only way to come out on top is to dumpster-dive towards the bottom.

This, of course, is an illusion, too. As always, the only people who are really unique are the ones who reject it altogether (and before I get accused of being a pretentious douche here, even though I’m not the most fashionable person on the planet, I am not pretending to be one of them). Everyone else is just toeing the line, being different-but-not-too-different, or, conversely, similar enough without looking like a carbon copy of the person next to them. Even those who opt for the simple, jeans-and-a-t-shirt look are making a conscious choice to step back while still retaining an aura of ‘normalcy.’ It’s the delicate dance of social life, something we participate in whether we realize it or not.

Remember this, next time you roll your eyes at a rail-thin girl who just moved to Bushwick wearing a pair of jeans with too many holes or a questionably-stained Grateful Dead tank top. It’s no different than donning Prada shades or a Louis Vuitton purse. It’s all silly.

Perhaps, in the postmodern abyss we live in where everything means its opposite, we can even make it make sense.

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