All you can wear: thousands of young people queuing in Milan to buy used clothes for 18 euros

Milan calls and TikTok responds. There were hundreds of young people who, at 8 in the morning on Saturday 9 September, were lined up in viale Espinasse 99 in front of the headquarters of the «Di mano in mano» cooperative for the initiative «All you can wear», that is «everything you can wear». The opportunity was tempting, given that the boys, who at 9.30 in the morning formed a large human snake that had arrived beyond the block, had the possibility of grabbing, at the fixed price of 18 euros, all the clothes and accessories they managed to cram into a bag provided at the entrance. This is an anti-waste shopping linked to recycled garments or unique pieces made with remnants and cuttings by the designers of «Tredicim» and the social tailoring «Taivé»for a total of thirty-five pallets of clothes and two thousand bags.

«We had a strategy to get further ahead in the queue, since we didn’t manage to arrive at dawn: that is pay five euros to someone to pretend to be friends and stay with them gaining positions,” Masha Sarbash, 18, told the Courier, explaining that she became aware of the «All you can wear» initiative thanks to TikTok. Together with several kids who folded clothes strategically, Marie Kondo-style, to fit as many clothes and shoes as possible in the bag, the goal of many customers was to buy clothes and then resell them on the Vinted app at a higher price, thus trying to make money on it. The subtext, of course, has to do with a certain environmentalist consciousness that sees second-hand goods as a resource to be exploited for a more sustainable world: in 2022 the organizers have calculated that the “All you can wear” sale it made it possible to avoid the emission of 60 tons of greenhouse gases.