The Guardian view on secondhand clothes: the thrill of the old | Editorial

Big business is getting in on the act as sales of ‘preloved’ garments boom. But can the trend curb our love for fast fashion?
“Few articles change owners more frequently than clothes. They travel downwards from grade to grade in the social scale with remarkable regularity,” wrote the journalist Adolphe Smith in 1877 as he traced a garment’s journey: cleaned, repaired and resold repeatedly; eventually cut down into a smaller item; finally, when it was beyond all wear