“Connoisseurs of Trash in a World Full of It”: The Global Secondhand Trade and the Queering of Pop-Rock Aesthetics, 1979–94

By the late twentieth century, a flourishing global secondhand market co-existed with the imaginative use of pre-owned materials to break down restrictive formulas of gender, sexuality, and class, to create aesthetically and politically groundbreaking art, and to provide incomes for small-scale entrepreneurs. The expansion of alternative commerce has a deep history rooted in earlier twentieth-century reform politics, changes in corporate capitalism, and transnational cultural influences. By the 1980s, though, the manipulation of retro fads by companies (such as Urban Outfitters) founded on the redistribution of used materials but adjusted to the more lucrative reproduction of retro-style merchandise, along with the near-reflexive association of thrift-store cross-dressing with pop iconization clearly threatened the outré status of secondhand exchange. Since the application of the word “vintage” to clothing in the late 1950s—a process in which high-end department stores like Lord and Taylor were curiously complicit—secondhand clothing had straddled radicalism at best.

Elsewhere, I contend that systems of recirculation maintained their status as “rogue” economies if only by virtue of resistance to the capitalist imperative of material and cultural obsolescence. This paper considers the vulnerability of that status in the face of the popularity of “grunge” style, the corporatization of recirculation, and adaptations of poor dress by high fashion. Ultimately, though late twentieth-century practices of re-use did compromise the long-standing economic resistance associated with recirculation and did dilute some of the cultural and political effects of secondhand styles, public presentations of secondhand continued to challenge gender norms while certain paths of exchange sustained traditions of innovative capitalism.