Thriftable trends for summer

No need to buy anything new here

Let me know if this is a universal experience — but my disposable income is feeling a little stretched this year. I’m not sure if it’s the insane inflation on groceries right now, or the fact that I was in Rotterdam yesterday and paid €6.50 for a cappuccino (of all places to pay that much for a coffee!)

So: When looking into trends for spring and summer 2025 I didn’t want to perpetuate the idea that you need to be buying something new — or buy some crazy vintage piece that you would need to be blessed by the vintage gods in order to find at a decent price.

First: I created a list of summer trends, based on what people are searching for on Pinterest (the ultimate tell of what people are really looking to style and wear) and then supplemented each trend using retail data from Edited. A little backstory: Edited is a retail intelligence platform that allows brands and retailers to find real-time insights and actionable recommendations around assortment, pricing, and site merchandising. For example, you can track how many brands are carrying a specific item, their prices over time, the colour trends, how often they are selling out (+ a lot more metrics). I’ve partnered with them (!!!) which gives me access to their data, as long as I mention them whenever a metric or insight comes from their platform.

Second: I went thrifting. Yesterday I was in Rotterdam and popped around to some proper-digging-required thrift stores. I don’t mean a cutie Amsterdam curated shop (I love those too) — but the type of store that has a bin of scarves for €2 each and a rack of “party dresses” for €10. I just wanted to double check that you could actually find these trends in a thrift store and at a decent price.

And with that, here are my thriftable trends for summer + 1 trend that I thought would be a real thing given the amount of coverage it got this month, but is not supported by the data. Like at all.

Also: I’ve picked up on the sentiment that people don’t want to follow trends anymore — so if you want, you can use this as a reference for what not to buy or wear this year. Up to you.

Halter tops — probably with polka dots or animal prints.

As a piece that comes in and out of style every few years, this one was especially easy to find at the thrift store — especially in a variety of fun prints, colours, and with 2000s embellishments.

Searches for ‘halter tops’ is up 69% in the USA compared to this time last year. We can also see similar trends in the UK and Canada.

Might be a trickier graph to read, but here we can see more halter tops selling out on online retailer sites this year (solid line), compared to last year (dotted line). Here, I specifically looked at halter tops that came in animal prints and spots (i.e., polka dots).

I’ve also been loving the ones in pistachio green (made popular by Djerf Avenue’s Peridot halter).

Flip-flops — and it doesn’t need to be The Row.

I thought that we would have reached peak saturation with this trend last year (people comparing The Row and Havianas was my entire TikTok feed last August) — but we were not even close to peak saturation last year.

194% increase in people searching for ‘flip flop outfits’ on Pinterest in the US.

We can also see (using Edited retail data) that brands are increasing the price of their black flip flops compared to last year — all the more reason to thrift!

I get it now.