Japan’s Closet Is Becoming a Loop
New 2026 surveys show how resale, gifting and reuse are becoming ordinary parts of clothing consumption
In Japan, changing seasons have traditionally meant changing wardrobes.
The practice is called koromogae — literally, changing clothes.
Winter items move into storage. Summer clothes come out. School uniforms and workplace clothing change with the season.
But every wardrobe change also creates another question.
What happens to the clothes that do not go back into the closet?
A 2026 survey from Onward Kashiyama offers an interesting answer.
Among people who let go of clothing during their seasonal wardrobe change, 43.6 percent said they discarded the clothes through trash or municipal collection.
But when Onward combined several routes that kept clothes in circulation — resale to secondhand shops, selling through flea-market apps and giving clothes to others — the total reached 56.4 percent.
In this survey, circulation beat disposal.
It is only one survey: 418 men and women in their twenties through seventies across Japan.
It should not be treated as proof that most clothing in Japan is now reused.
But it captures a change that is increasingly visible in Japanese consumption.
For more clothes, the first owner is no longer necessarily the last.
Used Is Becoming Ordinary
Another 2026 survey helps put the change into perspective.
Aucnet’s Circular Economy Lab surveyed 9,877 people aged 18 to 69 across Japan about buying used goods. It then conducted a more detailed survey of 2,535 people who had purchased secondhand fashion items.
In the broader survey, 53.6 percent said they had experience buying used goods.
That does not mean secondhand has replaced new products.
It does mean that buying something previously owned is no longer an unusual consumer behavior for a large part of the surveyed population.
The reasons also vary depending on what people are buying.
Among buyers of non-brand fashion items, price remained dominant: 59.3 percent cited being able to buy the item more cheaply than new.
But branded and luxury goods showed a different pattern.
Scarcity and perceived asset value appeared among the reasons for choosing secondhand.
That distinction matters.
There is no single “secondhand consumer.”
Someone buying a used everyday shirt cheaply and someone searching for a discontinued designer bag may both participate in the resale economy, but they are solving completely different problems.
The infrastructure can serve both.
The Closet Has an Exit Now
The change becomes easier to understand if we stop thinking only about buying used clothing.
Resale also changes the experience of buying new clothing.
A garment can now have an expected next step.
Wear it.
Stop wearing it.
Sell it.
Give it away.
Send it into another reuse channel.
That does not guarantee that the garment will remain in circulation indefinitely. Neither the Onward nor Aucnet research tells us how many times an individual item changes owners.
But it changes the decision a consumer faces when an item leaves the wardrobe.
The choice is no longer simply keep or throw away.
There are more exits.
And those exits can become entrances into someone else’s closet.
Japan Already Has the Infrastructure
This behavior did not appear from nowhere.
Japan has long had secondhand stores, specialist vintage shops and resale businesses.
What has changed is the number of ways ordinary consumers can participate.
Flea-market apps allow individuals to sell directly to other individuals.
Retailers operate collection and recycling programs.
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Secondhand chains buy clothing over the counter.
Specialist resale businesses handle luxury and branded goods.
Different systems cover different price points and motivations.
The result is not one circular fashion market but overlapping loops.
A low-priced shirt may follow a different route from a designer handbag.
A garment unsuitable for resale may enter recycling instead.
Another may be passed directly to a friend or family member.
The significance of the Onward result is therefore not that one resale method won.
It is that several circulation methods combined were more common than disposal among the relevant respondents.
Circular Does Not Automatically Mean Sustainable
There is a temptation to describe all of this as a sustainability success story.
The data does not take us that far.
Selling a garment does not tell us how long the next owner will use it.
Buying secondhand does not necessarily mean buying fewer clothes overall.
Recycling does not guarantee that a textile returns as another garment.
And neither survey measures the complete environmental impact of these behaviors.
So “circular” should be treated as a description of movement, not automatic proof of environmental benefit.
What the surveys can show is consumer behavior.
People have more established ways to keep clothing moving after they no longer want it.
And substantial numbers are using them.
That is already a meaningful change.
From Ownership to Temporary Custody
Fashion has traditionally been described through the moment of purchase.
What did people buy?
Which brand?
Which trend?
How much did they spend?
A circular wardrobe adds another question:
What happened afterward?
That question changes how we think about the value of clothing.
An item can retain economic value after purchase.
It can retain practical value for another person.
It can leave one wardrobe without leaving the consumer economy.
For higher-value fashion, Aucnet’s findings about scarcity and asset value make this particularly visible. Some products are not simply worn until they become worthless. Their resale potential is part of what makes them desirable.
For inexpensive clothing, the motivation can be much simpler: buying used costs less.
Different motives can still produce the same result.
The garment moves again.
A Closet With More Than One Owner
The old model of clothing consumption is easy to draw:
store → customer → disposal.
The newer model is messier.
A garment might move from a retailer to its first owner, onto a resale platform, into another person’s wardrobe, and eventually into another reuse or recycling channel.
Not every garment will follow that path.
In Onward’s survey, disposal was still the single largest individual method of letting clothing go.
But when the circular routes were combined, they were larger.
That is why the change is worth watching.
Japan’s fashion story is often told through what appears on the street: new brands, new silhouettes, new trends.
A different transformation is happening after those clothes leave the street.
The interesting part may no longer be only what Japanese consumers are buying.
It may be where their clothes go next.
