Segregation in the Fashion City: Thrifting, Symbolic Economy, and Gentrification in New York City

• In Event: 30661 - Section on Sociology of Consumers and Consumption Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2. Consumption and social inequality

Abstract

This paper brings into conversation two dominant discourses around New York City: one that celebrates the metropolis as a global icon of fashion, and the other, as an intense site of place-making where their possibilities and limits are enacted. Examining how these two realities merge, this paper seeks to provide some illumination on the broader question of how culture influences urban transformation, shapes the material conditions of the city, and for whom? Along with music, food, and the arts, fashion, for the majority of modern history, has been a critical part of the symbolic economy of cities. And while how fashion plays a role in the symbolic economy of cities has been the subject of some scholarship in urban sociology ( ), we know less about how fashion becomes a cultural mechanism that segregates the city. Considering this gap in knowledge, this paper seeks to illustrate not only how cultural meanings of secondhand fashion creates a symbolic economy, but also how this process of meaning-making segregates the city. To demonstrate, the study analyzes 305 surveys, 45-interviews with shoppers, ethnographic data, New York City rent data, and geospatial data of secondhand shops collected over the periods between 2018 and 2021, and summer of 2024. The result this paper shows is a hierarchical landscape of desire that reveals itself not only in purely visual ways but by remodeling the material conditions of the city where fashion becomes a facilitator for those who have access to the city and those who don’t.

Author

• Dicky Yangzom, New York University