TikTok personality Holly Reardon has gone viral after sharing a video showing the treasures she found while digging through her mother’s closet.
As she showed off the ‘90s pieces she discovered, Reardon made an emphatic plea to parents everywhere to save their old clothes, so that their children may inherit them someday.
In the viral video, the 26-year-old content creator told viewers that her mom “kept all her clothes from when she was a teenager,” which means that Reardon is now able to reap the benefits.
The TikTokker then proceeded to show off her discoveries, including an Abercrombie & Fitch denim mini dress that she described as “freakin’ cute”. Reardon also confessed that she “didn’t even know Abercrombie was around in the 90s”.
Viewers were quick to point out in the comments section that Abercrombie & Fitch has been around for more than a century. Many millennials also sounded off in the comments section, admitting that Reardon’s comments about the brand made them feel like dinosaurs.
In her caption, Reardon urged parents to “do it for [their] daughters”. But not all were keen on the idea, as one user commented that they were already enough of a “borderline hoarder” as it is, while another wrote: “I became an adult with Marie Kondo and I can’t keep anything that doesn’t spark joy.”
While there may be a few naysayers, Reardon isn’t the only TikToker urging parents to keep their clothes for their children. Months before the content creator posted her viral video, a teenager named Ava Marie went viral after revealing that she’d re-worn her mom’s 1994 prom dress to her own senior prom.
In 2022, The Cut interviewed different people about why they enjoy shopping in the closets of their parents, and many had varying answers. An operations analyst named Laura, 30, said: “It’s just so much more fun when I can go home and be like: ‘Oh my God, this skirt is fabulous. And my mom’s like: ‘Take it.’” Meanwhile, 26-year-old project manager Jeovanna said that breathing new life into clothes passed down to her was a “true representation” of herself, believing it to combine her ancestry with what she now likes, “meshing the future and the past together”.
While the New York Times proclaimed that “the golden age of thrifting” was over, data from Vestiare Collective suggests otherwise: interest in secondhand vintage and shopping will not stop with Gen-Z and millenials. Rather, it’s only beginning.
Gen-Z and Zillenials are notorious for loving vintage looks and those who don’t have the option to peruse the closets of their parents aren’t afraid to pay a pretty penny for what they deem as “quality pieces,” according to Vogue Business, which notes that the trend doesn’t look like it will be slowing down anytime soon.
In an interview with second-hand fashion site, ThredUp, Vogue Business learned “the global secondhand mark is expected to surge at three times the rate of the overall global apparel market up to 2027”.
It’s not only ThredUp seeing success in the Gen-Z market, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that, of the 15 million users on the second-hand fashion platform Depop, 90 per cent were under the age of 26.
Analysts at Deloitte theorised that Gen-Z’s predilection for retro clothes may have to do with the fact that they entered adolescence during and after the 2007-2009 recession. After undergoing such a formative period during financial hardship, it’s likely that it has had a long-lasting effect on their choices as consumers.
