On a recent day spent bopping around Brooklyn, I stopped into a few vintage stores to peruse the racks of Pleats Please, Galliano Dior, and various unlabeled Y2K-adjacent pieces. While no two stores were the same, one thing stood out: Everything was outrageously expensive.

I wondered if I was being unfair. After all, these stores have employees and rent to pay. Maybe I was just shopping in an area where sellers were counting on tech-moneyed fashion novices and trust funders to accept their gobsmacking prices. But after consulting with friends—both in the fashion industry and beyond—I found they shared similar qualms with secondhand shopping in their own cities.

Kristen Bateman, a fashion culture writer and founder of the brand Dollchunk , notes that secondhand pricing is extremely su

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