Secondhand Syndicate: That concert T-shirt you “donated” was more valuable than you thought

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They’re looking to capitalize on the lucrative “latent market” described by Planet Aid’s spokesman. This market is often found in the developing world, where items that can’t make it in Western thrift stores still turn a profit. The United Nations estimates that $2.3 billion worth of secondhand clothes—nearly half from North America—were exported throughout the world in 2006. Sub-Saharan Africa is the top recipient, although Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries also import tons of used textiles annually.

In her book Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia, Northwestern University professor Karen Hansen details the process of shipping used clothing across oceans for sale. Individual items—women’s skirts, for example—are collected and packaged in standard 50-kilogram bales. Local merchants purchase bales wholesale and sell individual items in bustling salaula markets, where consumers look for folds from the bale as a sign of freshness.

While Zambians’ preference for cheap, high-quality Western clothing has virtually eliminated Zambia’s domestic textile industry, Hansen cautions against seeing this as another example of Westernization.

“Clothing is not just any commodity,” she writes; it’s a medium through which we represent identity. Much in the way Western consumers alter and reimagine inherited apparel, the availability of cheap jewelry and women’s clothing allows Zambian men to display status through ostentatious cross-dressing. The trade also has created a new population of professional tailors who conform Western clothing to the traditions of Zambian society.

Even in developing countries with more robust textile markets, entire economic sectors have flourished around the breakdown and rebirth of used clothes.

While the Indian government outlaws secondhand clothing imports, it permits “mutilated” (deliberately shredded) used wools, which are used to produce new textile products that are distributed around the globe, writes University College London professor Lucy Norris in Anthropology Today. Like Hansen, Norris argues that the secondhand clothing trade goes two ways—a process of cultural sampling, not imperialism.

The sheer growth of the used clothing trade indicates that most countries have embraced it, with or without official blessings—for profit or not for profit. And as long as the supply side of the Western fashion industry is tethered to a cycle of frequent obsolescence, it’s likely those MC Hammer T-shirts will keep on coming.

Excerpted from Polite(Autumn 2008), a journal of arcana, deadpannery, and cultural criticism; www.politemag.com.

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