Am I financialy enabling child labor in 3rd world country by buying second hand fast fashion from Thrift shop and Vinted? Because I am not the one who originally bought the clothes from Shein. But buy buying it again from someone else I still use it uhhuhh this is complicated.
You must exist. You must exist within your means. You’re doing your best to minimize the impact. It’s fine. You’re doing good.
Also, increased demand at thrift stores doesn’t increase the supply of thrift from donations and doesn’t increase the consumption of fast fashion. At most it decreases the amount of things the thrift store throws out. So that’s a win too.
As for appearance? 🤷♂️ I stopped caring about stranger’s opinions long ago. Not sure how people survive otherwise. I remember it being stressful and exhausting.
Yeah the supply and demand thing is key here. People in developing countries are exploited because there is a financial incentive to exploit them. That financial incentive comes from people buying their products directly, because that is how they generate revenue. But there is no way they can generate revenue if you only buy their products second-hand, so its not incentivizing them to maintain their sweatshops or whatever.
The most damage buying second-hand can do is by generating revenue for these companies indirectly. For example if OP was in position where wearing these items contributes to fashion trends that cause others to buy the items directly. But unless OP is an Instagram influencer it something (which is doubtful, given that they’re on lemmy) then these indirect, second-order effects are very unpredictable and hard to measure.