Ahead of last year’s G20 Summit in Johannesburg, you may have come across stories about Dunusa, the open-air thrift market in the city’s central business district. At the time, the local government sought to shut down the market under the guise of law enforcement as the dilapidated state of the inner city gained more scrutiny. Most South Africans were not buying the sudden urgency to clean up the city. Least of all the city’s thrift-obsessed youth, for whom Dunusa is a hub for affordable second-hand clothing and sourcing for vintage wear.
The market has existed for decades, with many of the city’s emerging cultural movements, tastemakers and imagemakers passing through it. For much of the late noughties, it was mostly spoken about in fashion circles and remained the semi-secret of fashion school weirdos and stylists who knew what was up, but the culture has changed so drastically that over the years social, cultural and economic trends have made it more mainstream.
Globally, resale is booming. In the US alone, the secondhand apparel market has grown from $28bn in 2019 to $49bn last year and is projected to reach $56bn this year, per reporting in Forbes Magazine. Reports in South Africa estimate the local secondhand clothing market to be about R10bn.
“South Africa’s apparel market revenue was projected to reach R108.51bn by 2024, with approximately 9.1% stemming from second-hand apparel,” IOL reported.
My guess is that this is a conservative estimate that doesn’t account for thrift markets like Dunusa, where pairs of jeans sell for as little as R50, and R2,000 is often enough to reset an entire wardrobe.
While resale is frequently framed as a global trend, in South Africa it operates less as a novelty and more as an economic norm. This has less to do with shifting consumer preferences than with material conditions. In a country where the majority of people live under the breadline, price sensitivity is not an attitude but a necessity. Under these conditions, second-hand markets do not sit on the margins of the economy. They function as infrastructure and even as protest, as one creative project, “Dunusa: Life of a Garment” suggests.
The collaborative project by filmmaker Jack Markowitz and creative directors and designers Khumo Morojele and Klein Muis is a “protest (against) the impact of incessant output and obsessive consumption brought on by Western economies that continue to use African metropolises as sites of discard,” as reported by Nataal magazine. It reflects on a continent-wide issue that has been highlighted by creatives in cities like Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana, where photographers like Sackitey Tesa have made work highlighting the social fallout and issues around the second-hand clothing market while exploring the creative potential in upcycled fashion.
The problem with attempting to quantify the economic activity in these markets, like Ghana’s famous Kantamanto in Accra, is that much of it takes place in the informal economy, which by its nature resists clean measurement. Cash transactions, informal sourcing networks, and resale layered on top of resale all escape official accounting. This does not mean the market is small. It means the systems used to measure value were never designed to capture it. As a result, any hard number attached to any African country’s second-hand clothing economy is likely a wild underestimation.
Across Africa, second-hand clothing markets have long formed the backbone of urban retail, predating the language of resale. Long before thrifting was aestheticised, they were already economic engines. What South Africa is experiencing now is not the arrival of a new culture, but the increased visibility of one that has always been there.
What has changed more recently is how these spaces are seen. Platforms like TikTok have played a significant role in reshaping the image of thrifting, particularly among younger consumers. Through outfit videos, haul culture and thrift flips, informal markets have been recast as sites of creativity and taste-making. Influencers did not create demand for second-hand clothing, but they have helped to reframe it.
This shift matters, not because it expands the market, but because it extends participation in it. Thrift has become more legible to a wider audience, without losing its economic function, which is often putting food on the table for sellers, and affordability for working-class people. Cultural validation has followed material reality, not the other way around. In this sense, the so-called thrift boom reveals less about changing fashion cycles and more about how long South Africans have been dressing outside the formal economy, whether acknowledged or not.
Albeit diminished, the Dunusa market in Johannesburg’s CBD is still accessible to those in the know. All over TikTok, people are posting videos of themselves thrifting in new makeshift stores that have appeared close to the old open-air site near the Noord Taxi Rank. Again, the economic fallout from last year’s shutdown by law enforcement can’t be quantified, but if TikTok is anything to go by, there is no getting rid of a Dunusa. It simply transforms, off the books.
