IMAGE VIA LONDON ON MY MIND
IN A SHARED studio in Istanbul no bigger than a generous living room, Madison Mummery and her tailors cut dresses from fabric nobody else wanted. The rolls come from the fast-fashion factories that make Turkey one of the world’s largest clothing exporters: leftover material from cancelled orders, miscalculated runs or colours that fell out of fashion before the garments were even sewn. To a factory, a hundred-metre roll left over from a big order is a rounding error. “It’s minuscule for them,” Ms Mummery told the radio programme The World in 2025. “But for us, it’s gold.” Her brand, OhSevenDays, is one of a growing number betting that the industry’s waste pile is actually its next big opportunity.
The word for this material is deadstock, and it is worth being precise about what it means, because it gets confused with vintage. Vintage clothing has been worn; it has a history, a previous owner, maybe a stain or two. Deadstock has not. It is brand new fabric, or sometimes finished garments still bearing their tags, that simply never made it to a shop floor.
Every year the global clothing industry produces around 92m tonnes of textile waste, according to United Nations estimates—roughly a rubbish truck full of clothing dumped or burned every second. A big share of that is not worn-out old clothes. It is stuff that was made and never sold at all.
Young shoppers have noticed, and the market has organised itself to meet them. ThredUp, an American resale platform, put the value of the global secondhand clothing market at $393bn in its most recent annual report, published in April—roughly a tenth of everything spent on clothes worldwide. In the United States, the report found, the secondhand market grew nearly four times faster than ordinary retail clothing sales in 2025. Depop, the resale app most associated with Gen Z, has built a user base of more than 30m people, around 90% of them under 26. None of these figures distinguish neatly between worn vintage and unworn deadstock, but the cultural shift behind both is the same: owning something nobody else has, at a price fast fashion’s endless reproduction can never offer, has become more appealing than owning something new.
The fashion industry’s most prestigious names have started treating deadstock as a feature rather than an embarrassment. LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate, runs a platform called Nona Source that resells its own brands’ surplus fabric to younger designers at a fraction of its original cost. Reformation, the Los Angeles label that helped popularise sustainable fashion in the mainstream, builds entire collections around deadstock material as a matter of brand identity. At her Spring/Summer 2026 show, the designer Gabriela Hearst presented a woven collection made from 97% deadstock fabric, according to Vogue, a fashion magazine. Even mass retailers are testing the idea: Gap and Ralph Lauren both experimented with buying back their own old stock in 2025 to resell as curated vintage drops, rather than just discounting it into oblivion.
Some of this shift has been forced by law rather than taste. Burberry’s 2018 admission that it had burned £28m worth of unsold goods to protect its brand triggered a reputational reckoning the whole industry felt. France went further in 2023, passing a law that bans the destruction of unsold textiles outright, forcing French and France-facing brands to find somewhere else for their surplus to go. Deadstock shops, resale platforms and buyback schemes are, in part, where that newly homeless inventory ends up.
The complication is that deadstock and vintage resale do not actually fix the problem that created them. Fashion for Good, an industry sustainability initiative, found in its Rewear report that 86.5% of imported “rewearable” secondhand garments inspected were in fact defective: evidence that even the resale supply chain struggles under the sheer volume the fast-fashion model produces. Deadstock exists only because brands keep overproducing in the first place; celebrating its reuse risks endorsing the overproduction that created it. Gen Z’s enthusiasm for deadstock is real, and it is redefining how money moves through fashion. Whether it ever reshapes how much fashion gets made in the first place is a separate question, and the more important one. ■
