I Thrift. This Changed Everything

I need to confess something to you readers: I have been thrifting for years, and I thought I understood it. I thought the pleasure of the find, the velvet blazer hiding between polyester blouses, the perfect-waisted trousers that no one else saw, was the whole story. I thought I was already on the right side of fashion. Then I walked into ReMode at Evergreen Brick Works on a Sunday in April, and I realized I had only ever understood half of it.

The venue alone should have told me something different was coming. Evergreen Brick Works is a former factory transformed into a living demonstration of what it looks like when you refuse to throw something away and instead ask what else it could become. That is not an accident as a location, and ReMode (now in its fourth year in Toronto, organized by Fashion Takes Action) was making that statement loudly, beautifully, and without a single new garment in sight.

What I Walked Into…

Racks. Everywhere, but not the chaotic, discouraging kind you push through at a donation bin. These were curated: vendors like: Stitch & Salvage, Kimonoir, Wild Again, Lust & Found, and dozens more, each one a small world of someone else’s intention. A kimono reworked into a jacket. A vintage piece altered to fit a body that exists today, not one from forty years ago. Pieces with provenance. Pieces with a second life that looked, honestly, more considered than most of what sits in brand-new retail windows on Queen Street.

I moved through the Circular Fashion Marketplace the way I always move through a good thrift; slowly, with my hands, reading fabric the way you read a face. What was different here was the conversation. At every table, there was a person who could tell you the story of what they were selling. A story. That is a different transaction entirely, and it changes something in you when you experience it.

I briefly sat in on the ReMode Talks, and the session on overconsumption (led by Sabine Weber from Seneca Polytechnic and style advisor Afiya Francisco). I learned that we wear 20% of the clothes we own, 80% of the time. Read that again. Four-fifths of what hangs in our closets is essentially a museum of purchases made by a version of ourselves who believed, in the moment, that this piece was going to change something. The garment industry depends on that belief. It manufactures the feeling of need and then fills it, over and over, with things that end up in landfill inside three years.

The session on repair, “Why Repair Matters: Clothing, Care, and the Stories We Keep” was where I felt the emotional weight of the day fully arrive. Marium Durrani of The Rack by Marium, and Suanny Aranguren of The Shared Bag spoke about what it means to maintain a garment, to learn a stitch, to decide that something is worth keeping alive. My mother repaired everything. Her generation did not frame that as sustainable living, they simply did not have the luxury of disposability. Somewhere between her generation and mine, repair became something only people who could not afford new things did. ReMode is quietly, deliberately dismantling that lie.

What the Good Swap accomplished at ReMode 2025:

• 1,470 items of clothing diverted from landfill in a single event
• 1,033 items swapped between attendees; one person’s ending becoming another person’s beginning
• 437 items donated, extending their life beyond even the swap

All of this for $10, the price of one fast-fashion impulse purchase that would have been forgotten by Friday.

I have always thrifted for the thrill and for the savings. I will not pretend otherwise, that is part of the honest confession here. ReMode added a layer I was not expecting: accountability. Not the guilty, preachy kind that makes you feel bad and changes nothing. The curious, elevated kind that makes you look at your own closet differently and ask a real question: what is in here that I am holding onto, and what is in here that someone else could love more than I currently do?

The most stylish room I have been in this year had no new clothes in it. Every piece had already lived somewhere. Every person there was choosing, consciously, to be part of a different relationship with fashion, one that is less about acquisition and more about curation, care, and community. That is taste with intention, and if you ask me, there is nothing more luxurious than that.

Would you shop like this? I think you already know the answer. You just might need someone to show you how good it looks.