In Poland, Style Comes Used and by the Pound

this is not a tale of people buying used clothes in the midst of recessionary gloom. The global economic crisis has yet to hit a majority of Poles. Thrift stores here have become impromptu laboratories of the changing mores and attitudes in a country adjusting to newfound wealth. Young Poles here in the capital are now confident enough in their ability to buy new clothes that they at last have taken to wearing old ones. Those eking out a living on fixed incomes, especially retirees, still lack the means to do otherwise.And so the hip and the strapped meet at secondhand stores like Tomitex, on Nowowiejska Street in downtown Warsaw.

The pronounced stigma of buying used clothes in a poor country was once a powerful deterrent for shopping — or at least admitting to shopping — at secondhand stores, known here by the derogative colloquialism lumpex, which translates as something like bum export. That stigma has been replaced among the young by a playful attitude toward vintage clothing and bargain-hunting that would not be out of place among their contemporaries in London or New York. It is all part of the ferment of a capital rife with traffic jams as the new and used imported cars have outstripped the capacity of the roads to carry them all. One boutique for the latest new styles, aptly named Luxury & Liberty, has opened in the former headquarters of the governing Polish United Workers’ Party, which also previously housed the Warsaw Stock Exchange since the end of Communism. Poles, who under Communism had few choices for clothes, now have the entire spectrum, but the full breadth is only available to a few. The gulf between the haves and have-nots is wide, and the two sides are increasingly bumping against each other quite literally.