For Generation Z, spending less, not more, has become the ultimate flex. The second-hand trade is booming; the luxury trade, rather less so.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Not anymore, it seems, especially when it comes to money. There are plenty of reasons that explain the unstoppable rise of Vinted, a second-hand marketplace (not the least of which is the seamless way it enables sellers to send buyers goods) but the fact that increasingly large numbers of people are embracing what might be called conspicuous thrift is not the least of them. Set up back in 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Vinted announced in April that its 2025 revenue had reached 1.1 billion euros, up 38 per cent, on a gross merchandise value of 10.8 billion euros across 26 markets. In January, it crossed the Atlantic to enter the US market, its first outside of Europe. Just a few weeks later a secondary share sale led by EQT, a Swedish investment firm, valued the company at eight billion euros. The firm’s boss, Thomas Plantenga, told Reuters that Vinted was “a very useful tool if people have less money and things become more expensive, to sell things and make some money and find good deals”.
And nobody eyes a good deal as well as Gen Z, usually defined as young people born between 1997 and 2012. The high rents and insane property prices that largely prevent them from buying their own homes as previous generations did have led to their disposable income being reduced, even though those lucky enough to find good jobs tend to earn more than ever.
Vinted is not the only business to make good on the trend. Vestiaire Collective, a Paris marketplace for pre-owned designer goods, said last October that the 16-year-old company would turn its first annual profit in 2026 on gross merchandise value near one billion euros. A report published by the firm in cooperation with the Boston Consulting Group put the global resale market on course for 360 billion US dollars by 2030 and found pre-owned items already made up 28 per cent of the average wardrobe. It is almost certainly far higher amongst those aged under 30.
Last November, Claudia D’Arpizio, a senior partner at the consultancy Bain, presented the consultancy’s annual luxury study with Altagamma, an Italian trade body, and revealed that the market had shed roughly 50 million customers in 2024 and 20 million more in 2025 while new-customer acquisition had fallen five per cent year-on-year and the market for personal luxury goods flattened at around 358 billion euros (after its first contraction in years). D’Arpizio and her co-author Federica Levato suggest that much of the rationale for this lies in the changing habits of the young. Bain had earlier warned that Gen Z no longer displays wealth in quite the same way as its predecessors did. “This is luxury’s moment of truth,” D’Arpizio said: “to rise through ethics, inclusivity, and authenticity, or retreat into elitism.” In May, Vestiaire began supplying authenticated pre-owned stock to Zalando, a German retailer serving more than 60 million people in 14 European markets. Thomas Hezard, Vestiaire’s chief product officer, said the deal was an effort to make circular luxury “more relevant, and more appealing to a wider and younger audience”.
Flex that bargain
If money (or, rather, the lack of it) is the obvious explanation for Gen Z’s thrift, it is not the only one. Young people (at least the admittedly modest sample known to this correspondent) view not spending as being more chic and certainly more stylish than old habits of conspicuous consumption (and if they can be seen not spending all the better: luxury labels are no longer a badge of honour, but their absence is). To flex (as Gen Z might say) a label now looks a little gauche, but to flash a bargain most certainly does not.
Then there’s Gen Z’s social conscience, far more in evidence than that of their predecessors. Plenty of Gen Z consumers buy second-hand because they have a deep aversion to waste, a sentiment those who make the laws have noticed. Last month, the European Union banned large companies across the bloc from destroying unsold clothes and footwear. Medium-sized companies will be subject to the same rules from 2030. Gen Z no doubt approved, and likely celebrated the news at home with supermarket-bought snacks and drinks, not at an expensive cocktail bar.
Photo: Dreamstime.