Restructuring secondhand fashion from the consumption perspective

Abstract

The previously used luxury fashion market uses various terms, such as vintage, secondhand luxury, eco-fashion, retro, antique and ethical fashion. Researchers focusing on secondhand consumption find the field fragmented with many mixed and overlapping concepts. We clarify the existing conceptual discussions in the fields of vintage fashion and secondhand luxury by exploring their complex relations and ambivalent vocabularies. Prior research on luxury goods and fashion items has mainly focused on brand-new goods and on conventional shopping and retail channels, thereby largely neglecting the emergence of markets for previously used luxury products. Yet, there is a growing consumer interest for secondhand luxury and vintage fashion. Secondhand shopping has rapidly gained ground resulting in an increasing number of online platforms, auctions and flea markets specialising to purchase and sell used goods. We deploy a consumer perspective as an analytic framework to synthesise the existing threads of literature on secondhand fashion. Through an extensive literature review, we shed light on the various approaches that have been used when studying vintage fashion and secondhand luxury and distinguish between the focal approaches and related concepts that have been applied. Our conceptual analysis reviews 36 studies. First, we show that the matter has attracted researchers increasingly since the turn of the twenty-first century. Further, we explicate how different processes of a consumption cycle—acquisition, consumption and possession, and disposition—distinguish the phenomena of vintage fashion and secondhand luxury. Finally, we illustrate what are the theoretical consumer-related frameworks, such as perceived value, motivation, consumption practices and meanings that have been applied in the field of secondhand and what kind of content they get in prior discussions.