It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when second-hand shopping went from being seen as the right thing to do, to being considered the cool thing to do, to becoming so normalised that fashionable strangers have started to sell their clothes from old suitcases in conference rooms. There has been a recent and noticeable shift towards this sort of grassroots closet sale – see: the hundreds if not thousands of New Yorkers sifting through Chloë Sevigny’s belongings back in spring before raiding Jemima Kirke and FKA twigs’s wardrobes – as more and more people swap resell sites for IRL shopping. But this trend has for the most part been an American thing; a famous-person thing; and a slim-bodied thing.
“It started with me needing to do a massive closet clear-out,” says the content creator Alessia Golfetto, who earlier this month hosted her own closet sale at the Hoxton Hotel in Shepherd’s Bush. “But I didn’t want to just sell the clothes to someone looking for an ‘oversized’ fit on Depop. I wanted them to go specifically towards plus-size people.” And so: Golfetto persuaded a handful of fashion connoisseurs – the curve models Nine, Rebecca Louisy, Lucy Knell, Skye Standley and Char Ellesse – to part with their pre-loved threads, too. Each item ran from a size 14 to a size 26. “I knew that anyone would love what they had to offer! But it soon spiralled into something bigger than a sale,” she adds. “It created a safe space that curve girls don’t have compared to New York and Los Angeles.”
One of the most well-attended sales of 2024 was organised by model Paloma Elsesser and stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson in Manhattan. It was called “For The Girls”, and when the event was announced on Instagram, a considerable number of comments read: “Do a London one”, “I need to teleport” and “Please do one in London!”. The demand for well-made, affordable, interesting plus-size fashion outstrips supply even on the resale market, which is, of course, a symptom of there not being enough made in the first place. It takes time to find good clothing, and so when it reaches a closet sale, there is an element of trust, of something having been tried and tested, and of someone having done the hard work for you. “You have to stray from the high street to find the best bigger pieces,” Golfetto says. “I spend most of my time rifling through second-hand websites. It’s a chore.”
“The cycle of getting rid of something and passing it on doesn’t happen as much in the plus-sized world,” the British Fashion Council’s Davina Wedderburn wrote in a 2023 piece, in which she criticised the lack of second-hand fashion in even a size 16. (Ie, the average dress size for a woman in the UK.) “You don’t give away pieces because it’s such a rarity to find good-quality things you love.” Much like Thick Thrift in Los Angeles, Thick Threads provides shoppers with the sartorial camaraderie that straight-sized people get to experience when walking into a conventional shop. “I don’t know what Thick Threads is going to develop into,” Golfetto says. “But this will be the first of many events we’re going to host. I see Thick Threads as the beginning of a plus-size movement in London that centres its focus on pure style. It’s not just about being body positive, but looking cool,” she adds. “The message is simple: bigger people can build outfits that anyone would want to dress in. I can inspire trends, too.”
