Jennifer Le Zotte's From Goodwill to Grunge is a rich and timely cultural history of secondhand clothing. In the United States, 10.5 million tons of used clothing are sent to landfills each year. The share of discarded clothing that is recycled and reused is much smaller: in comparison, 1.8 million tons of cast-off clothes were recycled in 2014 (Elizabeth Cline, “Where Does Discarded Clothing Go?” The Atlantic [2014]). Rising environmental costs lead consumers and entrepreneurs to rethink their relationship with used clothing. Based on a wide range of sources, Le Zotte's book covers more than a century of history of secondhand retailing, thrift shopping, and vintage co-opting. Although the chapters are presented in chronological order, the histories of wearing secondhand clothes are nonlinear: the charms of old clothes go in and out of fashion, and necessity resurfaces along with economic hardship. The motif of individuation is masterfully analyzed through characters both obscure and famous who relied upon secondhand clothing to express themselves—and sometimes to engage in artistic pursuits. The ecological factor is a recent concern, fostered by the climate change crisis, and is less present as a motivation in this book.

The first chapter focuses on the thrift store as a variety of philanthropic capitalism, focusing on the Salvation Army, which started operating in the United States in 1897, and Goodwill, founded in 1902 by the Reverend Edgar J. Helms. A theme of redemption through work and capitalism emerges from these early histories. Le Zotte analyzes how the charismatic founders of these organizations staged themselves dressed in rags as a way to show their empathy for the destitute they had pledged to help. This is the start of a complex story of wearing secondhand clothing as a vector for critiques of the establishment. From the Gilded Age onward, collecting old furniture and objects was increasingly accepted socially, fueled by a culture of nostalgia for earlier times—notably, for colonial America—but used clothing seemed to resist this trend. Negative connotations stuck with secondhand clothing after early observers, including Charles Dickens, expressed the belief that secondhand clothes carried with them the actions and characters of their previous owners. Health hazards and germ theory, popularized during the Victorian era, also fostered the establishment's aversion to used clothes.

Throughout the book's first chapters, the shifting geographies of secondhand retailing build up a convincing chronology of the trade. The second chapter moves from the thrift store to the flea market. Crisscrossing the Atlantic between the Paris flea markets and Greenwich Village, the author explores how members of the Dada and Surrealist movements in the 1910s and 1920s used flea markets as hunting grounds for inspiration. Besides well-known figures such as André Breton and Max Ernst, the author traces the history of forgotten Dadaists who, like Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, wore flea market finds but also used garbage objects like tin cans in their creation of outfits. At that time, the volume of the sole Bowery secondhand business in New York was estimated to reach $3 million a year.

City dwellers with little storage space dropped off used objects at Goodwill, but in suburban America, access to thrift stores was not so easy. Chapter 3 moves from the big city to the suburbs, exploring garage sales in the context of the increase in car ownership from the 1950s onward. Garage sales were a fundraising option and a mode of suburban sociability. Garage sales also made room to buy new objects, which points to their ambiguous impact on consumption patterns and on the environment.

Chapter 4 introduces the term “vintage” and traces the origins of the word being used to designate old clothes. The author examines the sartorial strategies of the crowds who haunted Portobello market and Haight-Ashbury, and she seeks to revise the term “counterculture” when discussing consumers wearing vintage fashion as a manifestation of cultural elitism. Such views are mitigated with the history of the zoot suit, a wide, pegged-legged male costume that clashed formally with the wartime L-85 scheme, which rationed the use of fabric. Eschewing the classical analysis of the zoot suit as a form of sartorial rebellion, the author shows that necessity was at the core of such consumption strategies. With shops like Biba in London, the old and the new commingled in a reenactment of the past. Le Zotte walks in the footsteps of cultural theorist Angela McRobbie, analyzing elective poverty as a way to explore the cultural capital deployed in repurposed, mixed-media looks that aim to show distance from the establishment. This theme continues in chapter 5, on the Beat generation, with the study of actors who made vintage subversive in order to showcase their individualities and sexual preferences. Wearing vintage was, however, a mostly white rebellion, argues Le Zotte, who situates her object of study within the question of poverty in the West. Despite the fact that some chose poverty, others did not and had to buy secondhand simply because they could not afford to buy new.

Central to the book's last chapters is a well-researched history of the connection between secondhand and drag. Le Zotte impresses when she weaves together the history of the defense of homosexuals with that of sartorial subversion. At a time when men could still be jailed for shopping for women's clothes, thrift shopping afforded a space of safety and a treasure trove for sartorial transgressions. Le Zotte closes the circle between Jack Smith's avant-garde theater creativity and camp critique of novelty, and Rev. Helms's idea of employing destitute men and women to bring back discarded objects to a new, useful life. Creative reuse and positive transference from previous wearers supplanted the Dickensian vision of clothes carrying the sorrows of previous owners, an analysis that Le Zotte develops well into the last chapter of the book, on 1990s grunge sartorial and musical culture.

The last chapter and the epilogue address the question of the co-optation of secondhand looks by various brands that mix vintage and retro-looking new clothes. This type of commerce spares the affluent consumer the hunt for the distinctive vintage-looking piece, makes money on selling Salvation Army–type repurposed pieces for the price of new, and brings visual transgression back on the safer side of aesthetics. The analysis leaves aside the work of avant-gardist couturiers who have used secondhand garments, notably Martin Margiela, which might be a topic for future research. Rather than a conclusion, the author proposes an epilogue opened on the future of recycling and on the growth of auction websites that are, once more, changing the spaces of secondhand commerce. This is an impressive book that turns the cultural history of consumption into a vibrant plea for the culture of secondhand and for more sustainable development. It will without doubt inspire future research on the emotional economies of used objects, the economic history of secondhand business, and the recycling of garments and fibers.