Packing and Unpacking: International Students Traveling with Secondhand Fashion

Introduction

​

There is something about suitcases and clothes, especially for those who travel from time to time. The experience of traveling is always liminal – one is either here or there. With suitcases and clothes, however, one can always have a piece of another time or place by side. Our suitcases are packed with things we need, or things we believe we will need. When we arrive in an unfamiliar place, the things we carry in our suitcases can create a sense of home for us. Given the inconvenience of carrying furniture and other decorative items, for most cases, the majority of luggage consists of clothes – those we find useful, those we deem important, and those we anticipate to be important to where we go.

​

Packing suitcases serves as a partial narrative of a person, telling the story of why one is traveling and where one is coming from. Fashion items have a different meaning in the luggage that is packed. Temporality is at the heart of fashion itself; fashion is a medium that is time-based and time-specific (Evans and Vaccari 2020, 3). One fashion item that is “being-in-fashion” when packed might be “no-longer-being-in-fashion” later (3). Then why do people pack things that seem “temporal”? Or, what makes people think that there is something beyond temporality, beyond transient popularity in fashion that makes them willing to carry around? Secondhand fashion, considering the time and memories it might share with others, has a more complex temporality. 

​

This study comes from the author’s personal experience. As a Chinese international student who is living in New York City, I am often in a state of in-betweenness. When I stay at my apartment, I am also in a situation of “not quite home and not quite not-home” (Harlen 2018, 6), that is, despite the fact that it is my “home” in a foreign country, I find it difficult to experience a sense of belonging there. In these moments of longing for home while being physically far from it, my luggage – primarily my clothes – serves as a link, a connection to the past, people, and home. Baggage rules of most airlines limit passengers to two checked bags and one carry-on bag, making it practically impossible for international students going halfway across the globe to bring everything they need with them. Because of the limited space in the baggage, packing becomes a matter of deciding what is most important both practically and sentimentally. Secondhand items are given new life and put upon new emotions during recirculation, while international travel deepens these emotions and gives secondhand things new meanings. 

​

This study is put in several specific contexts. First, it will focus on secondhand fashion items carried around by Chinese international students who are living in New York City. Participants were selected within the author’s personal and social network, on the basis of their availability, willingness, and experiences of traveling and packing. The two participants, one females (Jessy) and one male (Ivan), are fashion lovers with many international travel experiences and, naturally, packing experiences; and they are currently living in New York City, which gives the author opportunities to talk with them in person and conduct object analysis on the researched secondhand fashion items. The author will conduct one-on-one in-depth interviews with them. The interviews are open-ended conversations designed to motivate the interviewees and encourage them to share their personal experiences and feelings. The author will also include her experiences of traveling with secondhand fashion items. Second, the term “secondhand fashion” here is referred to in a broader sense. In this case, mostly gifted fashion items, as defined by the interviewees. This paper explores the meanings of secondhand fashion to international students, in terms of why they are carrying these items, the possible particular meanings and connotations of these objects considering the limited space of the suitcases and closets, and how these objects create a sense of belonging (or not) for them in a foreign country. To explore the particular meaning of secondhand – gifted – fashion items to them, this study will also investigate who gave those items to them, under what circumstances, and for what reason. The participants will be asked if they have imagined a future for these items and, if so, what they would do with these objects that have memories and signs of use. 

​

While there has been a lot of research dedicated to wardrobe studies, travel and luggage, and second-hand fashion items, very little has focused specifically on international students who have had to reduce their belongings due to space constraints but still carry secondhand items with them. This study aims to fill this gap by asking why are international students carrying secondhand fashion objects (mostly gifted) with them in their suitcases with limited space? What makes them think that there is something beyond temporality, beyond transient popularity in the objects that makes them willing to carry around? Main research methods that will be used include autoethnography, interviews, object analysis, and image analysis.

​

Fashion, Time, and Memory

​

Shannon Mattern addresses the role of closets and cabinets as well as the stuff tucked in them, which involves the correlation between clothing and memory (Mattern 2017). The idea of people becoming “the managers of our own distributed personal archives” relates to why people are keeping and collecting secondhand items, especially when it comes to the sense of nostalgia. In Mattern’s words, closets are places where “past becomes space”. In this sense, for people who travel frequently, their suitcases can also be a space where the past haunts.

​

Most of the space in the suitcase is occupied by one’s clothes – and link to that, fashion. As Heike Jenss points out at the very beginning of her book Fashioning memory : vintage style and youth culture, “Memory is in fashion” (Jenss 2015,4), and it is a kind of memory that is promiscuous (Clark 2004, 28). Jenss called clothes inherited from the earlier years as “past-in-present”, as “they stir associations and become tools for remembering the past in a new temporal context” (Jenss, 105). Scholars including Wallendorf and Arnould share the similar idea of an object’s ability to hold memories. They point out how an object could be a reminder of friends, family, events, and how it functions as a storehouse of personal memories, meanings, gender, age, and culture (Wallendorf and Arnould 1988, as cited in Niinimäki and Armstrong 2013, 191). Secondhand fashion, considering the time and memories it might share with others, has a more complex temporality. 

​

With a strong emphasis on now and privilege of the present, the dynamic of fashion, however, seems like an “inevitable struggle with or against time” (Evans and Vaccari 2020, 6). The complex temporality of fashion has been addressed by many scholars. Among them, Evans and Alessandra Vaccari come up with three alternative ways to think about fashion, which are industrial time, antilinear time, and uchronic time (3-36). To better explain these models of relationships between fashion and time, they borrow the concepts of time by Keith Moxey. Chronology, relating to industrial time, addresses the temporal trajectory and mainly fits into a Euro-American context (6). Heterochrony, meaning “many coexisting times”, is relevant to antilinear time. And anachrony, meaning “out of time”, links to uchronic time. Heterochrony and anachrony, or, antilinear time and uchronic time, can be found relevant to secondhand fashion – the former suggests the coexistence of the past and the present in terms of the traces of the past in the present, and the latter’s potential to “allow  invention of possible futures, and the rewriting of the past” and a “forward-looking fantasies set in an imagined future” (29-30). 

​

Packing, Unpacking, and Letting Go

​

As a person who left home at a very young age, I moved through school dorms, hotel rooms and apartments in different cities, and now, I travel internationally. Frequent traveling and moving do not allow a lot of belongings, which makes every packing experience a decluttering process. Decluttering, defined by Rachel J. Eike et al., is “a behavior or process of removing unwanted or messy items from a given space, has been suggested as a way of clothing or/and clutter removal” (Eike, Burton, Hustvedt, and Cho 2021, 2). Decluttering in daily life could be a behavior that sparkles joy and contributes to emotional health (4), but decluttering for traveling or moving is a different thing. It is, to a large extent, a process of learning how to leave things behind,  even those you really like and would be longing for in the future; it is about “letting things go”.  

​

I have a dress that I really love. It was a white ankle-length cotton dress that I fell in love with the first time I saw it. However, the store no longer had my size when I went to buy it, so I finally bought it on a secondhand platform after searching for a long time. I wore it for my undergraduate graduation photos. For me, it means more than just a beautiful dress; it represented the end of my undergraduate life and made up for my regret of not being able to have a graduation ceremony because of the Covid-19. I wanted to bring it with me when I came to New York City, but it is too large and heavy to fit in my suitcase with limited space. I could only leave it in my parents’ house in China. 

​

Frequent travel and moving makes people face such moments when they have to “declutter” some items, which heavily influences their purchasing habits. For a very long time, my suitcases have been virtually my closet. Therefore, every time before I made a purchase, I had to make sure that I really liked the item and could take it everywhere with me despite the inconvenience of packing. One of my interviewees, Jessy, shared very similar experiences to mine. Before coming to New York City, she spent four years in Melbourne, Australia for her undergraduate study. In her early days in Melbourne, the freedom to shop on her own for the first time away from her parents allowed her to buy a variety of clothes. However, when she graduated from university and planned to move back to China she realized that there was no way she could pack everything into her suitcase, and the high international shipping costs made her give up on mailing them back home. She had to get rid of a lot of her clothes, whether she gave them to friends, sold them or threw them away. This experience of dealing with clothes led Jessy to be extra cautious with every purchase after arriving in the United States. The return policy has greatly helped her to build a simple and essential wardrobe. “The return policy in the U.S. allows for 14 or even 30 days to return or exchange clothes,” Jessy remarked, “so I can decide whether to keep them after trying them on and considering if they match with those I already have.” 

​

The insecurity and sense of loss that comes with being away from home for long has led Jessy and I to have very similar packing habits. Even if we had to leave something behind, we both tended to bring items that we thought were necessary and that would quickly give us a sense of “home” once we unpacked, thus we always packed as much as we could – Jessy even brought a vacuum cleaner from China to the U.S. However, different life experiences have led to various packing habits. Ivan, the other interviewee, was born and raised in the same city; he had a brief year as an exchange student in New Zealand before moving to New York. He prefers to bring as little luggage as he can. He wants a “fresh start” as opposed to a sense of belonging – “Anything I can buy at my destination I won’t bring.” Of course, Ivan also had items that he wanted to bring but had to “let go”. He collected about 100 pairs of sneakers, each pair has a story behind it, and they all have a unique meaning to him, some are brand new, some are second-hand bought from others, and some are gifted. He had to leave them at home in China.

​

The professional organizer and advocate of the decluttering movement Marie Kondo stresses the importance of keeping things that “spark joy”, emphasizing choosing what to keep rather than what to discard. This is similar to the experience of packing, we can only choose to bring those things that are important to us, those that bring pleasure, those that we cannot let go.

​

Memory and Not Letting Go

​

I have a recurring dream in which I realized that I had left my clothes in some school dorm, hotel or apartment closet. The remorse and fear of forgetting something was so real that I could not tell if I had actually left my clothes in a closet once. Clothes are so important to me that the long period of being lost and lonely was materialized in my dreams as the absence of clothes. Advanced transportation has the ability to get anyone to any continent on the planet in a dozen hours, but it also makes people feel lost sometimes. One day I am in a small, calm border town in southwestern China, the next I am in the busy, noisy metropolis, New York City. I, as many other international students, share the feeling of often in a situation where I am not quite home but not quite not-home, where I question a lot who I am and which place I belong to. 

 

Our luggage is a condensed “house” that constructs a home for us in a foreign country. The items that we cannot let go are things that we consider to be physically and emotionally significant –  those that I take with me to each place, those that Jessy still kept after several decluttering, and those that Ivan feels he cannot buy at the destination. I asked Jessy and Ivan what they would put in their suitcases first; and, as I expected, they choose things that have special meanings to them, just as I do. Many of these items are gifts from others – they are more irreplaceable than the things we purchase ourselves because of the interpersonal relationships and shared memories. 

​

Where Past Haunts

​

Every time I visit Ivan’s apartment in New York City, I find a Louis Vuitton bag hanging in a prominent place on his clothes rack. The bag, according to Ivan in our interview, was a gift from his mother. It is a cute little bag (see Figure 1) from the capsule collection of the collaboration between the fashion house Louis Vuitton and Japanese designer Nigo (also known as Tomoaki Nagao). Ivan first learned about this bag in New Zealand when he studied there, he tried to purchase it from a Louis Vuitton boutique but it was not launched yet back then. He told his mother about the bag once; but he soon forgot about it after returning to China. Six months later, to his surprise, his mother gave him the bag as a Christmas present. “I was very surprised not only because I didn’t expect my mom would buy me a luxury bag,” Ivan said, “but also because it was limited to 500 pieces worldwide, which was difficult to get. I don’t know how she got it, but she must have put a lot of effort into it.” After receiving the gift, however, Ivan did not wear it at first because he thought it was inappropriate for a student to wear a luxury bag at school. His mother had been wearing the bag for half a year before Ivan brought it to the U.S.

 

Co-owned by Ivan and his mother, the bag becomes a place where past and shared memories haunt. During his first year in New York, Ivan almost never wore the bag, but he still hung it in a place where it could be seen. “My mom would carry this bag on our family trips, so it reminds me of memories shared with my mom and dad,” Ivan explained why he brought this bag here and hung it on the rack, “and it also brings me back to days in New Zealand.” Ivan is now carrying this bag more and more, as he finds it functional and practical – “you need to show your passport several times at the airport; it is just the right size to hold your passport and cell phone… very convenient.” Moreover, Ivan believes that as a luxury item, the exclusivity and uniqueness of the bag help him to stand out and construct an identity. As we use objects, new temporality, memories and meanings are given to them. He has carried this bag to Mexico, Bermuda and some other places, but despite the new memories, the first thing Ivan thought of when he saw the bag was still that it was a gift from his mother, which is a symbol of family and love. When asked how he will deal with the bag when it is on longer fashionable and popular, Ivan thought he will still keep it; even if he dies one day, he hopes it can be cremated with him.

​

The first item that came to Jessy’s mind when I asked about secondhand fashion objects she brings with her is a sweater. She called it “the oldest clothes” in her closet. The sweater is one of the several sweaters her mother bought for her right before she went to Australia in 2016, and it was once her favorite one. As recalled by Jessy and me, the mainstream fashion that dominated the Chinese Internet in those years are wide tops with skinny pants and minimalist style. The sweater is loose and comfortable with a simple gray color as well as a sophisticated silhouette. She laughs that this sweater and another pair of skinny jeans were her dating outfit, as many people told her that she looks good in them. “I thought it was stylish for its cowl neck and silhouette, and it is 100 percent cashmere, very comfortable and warm, so I wore it a lot,” Jessy showed me some pictures of her in the sweater (see Figure 2), “In my early days in Australia, many photos were taken wearing the sweater.” 

​

Even though the fashion has completely shifted in the past few years and wide clothes are no longer as popular as they used to be, Jessy still brings the sweater with her everywhere – she brought it to Australia, back to China, then to the United States, to any destination that she believes a sweater is necessary. The attachment between the sweater and Jessy not only comes from its appearance and functionality, but also relates to the person who gave her the sweater – her mother. As an adult who has been living alone for years, Jessy is old enough to buy herself clothes, but she always has a feeling that “the sweaters I bought myself are not good enough, only those my mom bought for me are good”. Just as a small bite of madeleines has the ability to take Marcel Proust back to his childhood, the smell in the sweater reminds Jessy of her mother and home. “It retains the smell,” she said, “I can catch the lingering smell of  laundry detergent my mom used at home.” After nearly seven years of wear, this sweater has been well preserved with only minor distortion. Jessy tried to protect it as best as she could to prolong its life – she never wore it close to her body to reduce the frequency of washing. When it comes to the sweater’s future life, Jessy said she had never thought about it, but she believes that she would throw it away when it cannot be worn anymore; “after all, my mom can always buy me new clothes,” she said.

​

Where Future Goes

​

A piece I carried everywhere is a black cotton short-sleeve top from RIPNDIP (see Figure 3), a brand known for its funny character – a white cat that always has its middle finger up. Except for the small cat pattern on the chest, it is an ordinary black T-shirt that one can find in every fast fashion brand. What made it special to me is that it was given to me by a best friend and I wore it during my high school graduation trip. The brand RIPNDIP was very popular in 2016 when I was in high school, and I found the cat with the middle finger funny and sarcastic. However, there was no way to buy this T-shirt in China, so my best friend asked her sister who was abroad to buy it for me. 

​

Later after graduation, I went to Singapore with my six best friends — and the seven of us are still best friends now. We spent months planning the trip during our senior year. Even with the stress of the college entrance exam, we still made time to discuss and finalize the details — dates, flights, hotels, itinerary. The trip only lasted a week, but it was so much fun that we agreed to travel together once a year. We traveled together three or four times over the next few years, but one or two people were absent each time for various reasons. For almost six years, we spent nearly every day together, and now we are scattered all over the planet. As we get older, it seems increasingly difficult to get seven people together. In recent years I have stopped wearing it outside, because I think I have passed the age of wearing unique clothes to show my personality. Bringing it with me is a kind of nostalgia and also an anticipation for me. Sometimes I wear it to bed, and when I close my eyes, all the good old days come back to me. On a cold, rainy night in New York, I could smell the humid, warm tropical air from it.

​

​

We are either here or there in terms of time and space, but with the gifted fashion items, many times and places coexist and we can live the past or future in the present. For Jessy and Ivan, they recall memories in other places by finding the traces of the past in the present (Evans and Vaccari, 29-30). For me, I try to construct a possible future with forward-looking fantasies. 

 

​

 

Conclusion

Fashion, as something that is time-based and time-specific, surprisingly but inevitably struggles with or against time (Evans and Vaccari, 29-30). The experiences and practices of human beings in real life are liminal – we are either here or there. With fashion, however, one can experience many coexisting times in the present. This paper explores the ability of fashion to allow multiple times and memories to coexist. The research is put in some specific contexts: Chinese international students – the author herself and two participants – with traveling experiences, and the secondhand (gifted) fashion items they pack in their suitcases and bring with them. 

The experience of being in a foreign country naturally leads international students to seek a sense of belonging, and much of this comes from their belongings. Because of the limited space in their suitcases and frequent moving, international students are allowed to have very little luggage, making each packing experience a decluttering process. This process is about “letting things go”, even if there are things they are still longing for when they arrive at the destination. Therefore, the items that they cannot “let go” are the ones they find sentimentally and practically important to them. This paper asks what makes them think that there is something beyond temporality, beyond transient popularity in the fashion objects that makes them willing to carry around.

 

After examining the authors own, Jessy’s, and Ivan’s experiences of traveling and objects they packed in suitcases, this paper concludes that international students brings gifted fashion items for various reasons, which includes the functionality, quality, market value of these objects, as well as their ability to bear memories with certain people or places, to construct identity and personality through their uniqueness and exclusivity, and to deal with loneliness, homesickness, nostalgia, and belonging. The above reasons are not independent, but intertwined. Due to the nature of fashion, these items make different times – whether past, present, or future – to coexist, which allows us to live the past or future in the present.

​

This paper seeks to fill the research gap of international students’ second-hand fashion practices. However, there are some limitations in this paper, such as the limited sample, the authors’ subjectivity, and the fact that only the category of “gifted items” was studied. Nevertheless, the paper still points to some future research directions, such as the impact of international travel on consumption habits, the role of sustainability in international students’ fashion practices, and the influence of return policies on wardrobe construction in different regions. ▪︎

​

References