Secondhand clothes are cooler and sexier than anything new, says the TV presenter. So she took her family shopping in Oxfam to prove it
‘I think it’s so sexy to get dressed for a fiver,” says Miquita Oliver. She looks like a million dollars in an off-the-shoulder ivory bustier top with a cappuccino-froth of feathers below the neckline, and blue jeans that sit perfectly on her hips and graze the top of her kitten heels. It is note-perfect supermodel-at-an-afterparty cosplay – “my 90s Kate Moss look”, she calls it – but until two days ago, these clothes were buried among the mountains of cast-offs at Oxfam’s Yorkshire warehouse.
Oliver – television presenter, fashion week front-row fixture and now Oxfam ambassador – is a new kind of style icon, one who believes that secondhand clothes are not just better for the planet (although they are) or more affordable (ditto) but cooler – and sexier – than new clothes. Not second best for being secondhand, but more joyful for being pre-loved. So strongly does she believe this, in fact, that today she has taken up the challenge of styling her mum, TV chef Andi Oliver, and her 84-year-old grandmother, Maria, in clothes she found during a rummage through the Oxfam warehouse in Batley, to prove that secondhand is for everyone.
Secondhand September, now in its fourth year, is Oxfam’s annual campaign challenging shoppers to buy only secondhand clothes for a month. With September issues of glossy magazines pushing new trends and the high street aglow with boxfresh trends, the month has traditionally been the high-water mark of trend-led, disposable fashion – and nowhere more so than in the UK, where we buy more new clothes per person than anywhere else in Europe. It’s a habit that presents a calamitous threat to the future of our planet. One new pair of jeans is responsible for an estimated 16.2kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 58 miles in a car.
