Second-hand clothing: consumption, disease, and disposal (São Paulo, 1900-1914)

ABSTRACT

The systems for exchanging, selling and transmitting second-hand clothes form practices that can be recognized in the historical record. At the beginning of the 20th century, these systems were confronted with forms of consumption that made new products testimonies of modernity. This article begins with the classic episode of Emílio Ribas’s experiments in 1903, which studied how people used second-hand clothing and their fears surrounding it. The argument presented here is that people, in the context of disputes over different types of knowledge and a period marked by various epidemics and the expansion of industrial capitalism, produced new apprehensions about clothes used by others, reinvigorating the connection between health and novelty. This apprehension boosted disposal-based consumer culture in the city of São Paulo in the period between 1900 and 1914.

Keywords: second-hand clothing; consumption; health; disposal; epidemics