There was a time, 58-year-old Barry says, when the clothes coming into his warehouse reeked of love, instead. “People used to buy a good-quality suit and that was it. That was their suit,” he says. “The clothes that ended up here were worn to death, treasured, loved.”

A while ago, I was shopping like crazy, reasoning that I needed new clothes for an image-obsessed new job with an image-obsessed new boss. When I hit the three-month mark and got confirmed, someone inside me leaked. I felt like I had nothing to prove anymore. I felt empty and there was an extreme clarity that I didn’t understand. That was probably around the time I stopped shopping, because I was alarmed at owning so many pairs of shoes. Somewhat like a horse whose blinkers had been lifted, I suppose.

The article talks about the alarming amount of waste that fast fashion generates. And it does sound like a sad state of things. Can you imagine? Instead of writing a tale about an old women fondly caressing the finery of her decadent youth, it will be about her discovering with a jolt that the latest something she thrifted was something she tossed out decades ago. Oh wait, that’s not possible. Whatever she threw out back then would have disintegrated into rags that can’t even be used to clean by then.

After you read that, read this about how young and more affluent Poles have taken to thrifting, battling more impoverished retirees for the best buys.

The pronounced stigma of buying used clothes in a poor country was once a powerful deterrent for shopping — or at least admitting to shopping — at secondhand stores, known here by the derogative colloquialism lumpex, which translates as something like bum export. That stigma has been replaced among the young by a playful attitude toward vintage clothing and bargain-hunting that would not be out of place among their contemporaries in London or New York.

I find it fascinating how small the world is.