Global interest in archive fashion has grown exponentially. Suddenly, within a span of four to five years, it became commonplace for Gen Zs to talk fashion. Not just any kind of fashion, but fashion. It’s a global pandemic in itself. We have everything from TikTok edits of John Galliano’s Dior FW03 show (PETA protester, Alek Wek tripping on her own high heels and all), to frail cigarette pants-wearing boys talking about their ‘fashion holy grails’ on IG Reels, to Margiela LARPers confidently explaining house codes they barely understand. Just a week ago, Vogue Business declared that “Resale has gone mainstream”, and projected that the global fashion resale market was worth roughly $USD 210 billion in 2025 and is forecast to grow to $USD 320–360 billion by 2030. It’s clear that this is a market many investors are watching closely, particularly in an era where tastemaking and culture-building have become markers of both capital and cultural relevance. What follows is a closer look at how this global shift is being negotiated in our own local archive fashion scene.
What’s Singapore’s role in this? Playing catch up. Singapore’s resale market is smaller and less mature compared to regional peers such as Thailand and Vietnam, and significantly behind more developed ecosystems like Japan and South Korea. While Singapore’s luxury goods market reached approximately USD $10 billion last year (Euromonitor), its resale ecosystem remains relatively limited at around USD $115 million, indicating a large gap between consumption and circulation. In comparison, Thailand’s recommerce market is estimated at around USD $1.7–1.8 billion, where secondhand retail is more embedded into everyday shopping culture rather than confined to niche resale platforms.
The differences are most visible on the ground. In Singapore, archive fashion spaces are still routinely folded into a catch-all terminology bin of “thrift”, with many positioned less as a defined retail category than as curiosities, “hidden gems” you stumble upon rather than a culture you already recognise. Capital talk aside, resale is ultimately a question of cultural cachet: how fashion is named, understood, and granted legitimacy in public consciousness, particularly within Gen Z’s accelerating turn toward secondhand and archival consumption. In that sense, a less mature resale ecosystem doesn’t signal a lack of youth fashion culture so much as a lag in its institutional and linguistic recognition: where culture exists, but the vocabulary, infrastructure, and everyday normalisation are still catching up.
So, a group of individuals are wanting to make a change. Introducing the battle players: Upstairs Garments, Supper House, and their collaborative archival fashion market event, See See Look Look, that took place over the weekend of 6-7th June.
If you analyse the credits of recent editorial spreads ranging from major publications to student-led projects and independent creative ventures, you’ll likely notice a familiar name appearing time and again: Upstairs Garments. Tucked away on the fourth floor of a shophouse along Tanjong Pagar Road, the archive fashion store has become a fixture within Singapore’s creative ecosystem. Two years into its existence, introductions feel hardly necessary. Last weekend, the store partnered up with local arts platform Supper House to stage Singapore’s largest archive fashion market to date, cementing its position at the centre of the country’s growing archive fashion community.
“Compared to other cities, we still have some catching up to do. KL has a more diverse scene, Bangkok has arguably the best archival fashion scene in Southeast Asia. That’s exactly what we’re trying to challenge. This is also a sentiment we receive from our customers,” mentions Ker Hsien, one of the four co-founders of the store.
Reeling in almost everyone on their Rolodex, they brought on a few familiar local fashion and food vendors, like Fassbender and Melloncollie, Dirt Fruits, Loop Garms, and several other international vendors from Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and USA. The end result? A visitorship of roughly 3,500 participants over the weekend. For reference, that’s about 10% of Mercury Festival’s total visitorship on the same weekend. While Mercury Festival champions a broader, general audience, it’s definitely a good starting point.
“Both Upstairs Garments and I had only anticipated to receive about 1,000 visitors over the two days. We were very conservative with our numbers.” says Ashley Chiam, founder of Supper House. “My initial proposal was a fashion week watch party, inspired by the fashion influencer Lyas. The team countered back by proposing a fashion market instead, and I was more than happy to go along with it.”
More importantly, this event raises a broader question about what exactly constitutes a mature fashion ecosystem. If archive and resale are ultimately reflections of how fashion knowledge, objects, and communities circulate, then markets like SSLL function more than just your conventional fair or run-of-the-mill retail events. It’s cultural infrastructure. Several vendors noted that they performed better here than at more general lifestyle markets, suggesting that success was simply not just a matter of footfall, but of audience alignment.
“After boothing at other markets last year, I was more focused on finding the right audience. Different communities engage with fashion in different ways, and my selection tends to resonate with a more specific niche. At some markets, people were interested, but the context wasn’t always ideal for what I was trying to present. That’s why See See Look Look felt like such a great opportunity. I also put together a precursor exhibition beforehand, so my booth felt like a natural continuation of the event,” says Gynne, the founder of Dirt Fruits, an archival shop specialising in stocking Japanese Heisei-era fashion and paraphernalia.
The most valuable thing changing hands that weekend may not have been the clothes themselves, but proof of audience. The question now is why Singapore’s archive fashion ecosystem still feels comparatively underdeveloped. Part of the answer may be structural: our domestic market is much smaller, high retail overheads, and a limited number of recurring spaces mean that demand does not always translate into sustained infrastructure. Unlike larger regional hubs where specialist dealers, markets and their communities reinforce one another, Singapore’s scene is still assembling its connective tissue. In that gap between interest and infrastructure lies both the constraint — and the possibility.
“Growing a community is not a race to see how fast you’ll grow but how much value they bring to their respective communities. Every vendor at this market is someone we genuinely believe in. We approached friends from around the world, people who are doing important work and asked them to be part of this,” says Vegas, co-founder of Upstairs Garments.
The final, overarching question here is moreso an observation: Is See See Look Look a first step toward a prevailing force in Singapore’s archive fashion landscape, or will be a well-attended blip that will eventually fade into its own niche corner? Only time will tell.
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