In my own primary research among Chinese students in Shanghai, the findings suggest that in China, about 71% of students choose to ditch away their used clothes instead of donating them (Figure 1). They claimed that it was just a habit for them to do so.
However, things are extremely different in the UK. In a research study among the British in 2019, it was found that at the time, more than 42% of people in the country had over half of their wardrobe made up of second-hand items, as is shown in Figure 2 (Smith, 2022).
Estimation of the proportion of consumers’ wardrobe acquired second-hand or vintage in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2019 (Smith, 2022).
Based on the two figures presented above, there goes without saying that it is important to find out the reasons behind Chinese people and British people’s different attitudes towards used clothes or secondhand clothes. In terms of why secondhand or used clothes are widely accepted in the UK, according to Hur (2022), it goes hand in hand with economic, self-expressive, hedonic, environmental, and social contribution values of the secondhand clothes. In other words, for many British people who choose to use secondhand clothes, these second clothes not only can help them save money but also address their increasing concern over environmental problems that are closely associated with the fashion industry, and wearing secondhand clothes shows people around them that they care about the environment and that they are contributing to make a difference. However, things are quite different in China. In a research study by Wang et al. (2022), Chinese customers, especially young people born in the 1990s and 2000s, do not think too much about economic or environmental protection motivations when they buy fashion items. Rather, their primary consideration when it comes to fashion consumption is treasure-hunting fun, as 96% of them claimed that they purchase clothing items for fun in the research by Wang et al. (2022).
In the meantime, cultural and historical factors may also have played their role in shaping the different attitudes of the Chinese people and the British people to the secondhand clothes. For example, according to Davis (2010), trading secondhand clothing in the UK went all the way back to 1700, where residents in both East End and West End in London began to trade secondhand clothes of the emerging middle class. Although secondhand clothing was once stigmatized as something for the poor, since World War I, the scarcity of resources have made secondhand clothing a symbol of perseverance in difficulty times in the UK (Maude Bass-Krueger, 2020). However, in China, due to the fact that people were not richer until the Open Up and Reform policy in the 1970s, many people still have the impression that used clothes are symbols for low-class and having low social acceptance (Xu et al., 2014). In view of such, it should not be surprising that in the UK, there has been a mature system for trading used clothes. For example, according to Ek Styven and Mariani (2020), in the UK, there are not only B2C (business to customers) platforms but also P2P (peer to peer) platforms for secondhand clothing. However, in China, the trading system for used clothes just got started in recent years as a result of the influence of increasing popularity of secondhand clothing from Western countries (Wang et al., 2022).
References
Davis, J. (2010). Marketing secondhand goods in late medieval England. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 2(3), 270–286. https://doi.org/10.1108/17557501011067815
Ek Styvén, M., & Mariani, M. M. (2020). Understanding the intention to buy secondhand clothing on sharing economy platforms: The influence of sustainability, distance from the consumption system, and economic motivations. Psychology & Marketing, 37(5), 724–739. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21334
Hur, E. (2020). Rebirth fashion: Secondhand clothing consumption values and perceived risks. Journal of Cleaner Production, 273, 122951–. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.122951
Maude Bass-Krueger, H. E.-D. (2021). Fashion, Society and the First World War : International Perspectives. Bloomsbury Academic.
Smith, P. (2022). Estimation of the proportion of consumers’ wardrobe acquired second-hand or vintage in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2019. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1135244/proportion-of-wardrobe-second-hand-in-the-uk/
Wang, B., Fu, Y., & Li, Y. (2022). Young consumers’ motivations and barriers to the purchase of second-hand clothes: An empirical study of China. Waste Management (Elmsford), 143, 157–167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2022.02.019
Xu, Y., Chen, Y., Burman, R., & Zhao, H. (2014). Second‐hand clothing consumption: a cross‐cultural comparison between American and Chinese young consumers. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 38(6), 670–677. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12139