The short version
- A photograph records contrast well and texture badly, so stains and fading show up clearly while pilling, thinning and a loss of hand almost never do.
- Compare a part of the garment that was exposed to light with a part that was hidden — inside a placket, under a collar, inside a pocket bag — and fading stops being a matter of opinion.
- The most useful photo you can ask for is the garment held up against a window, because thinning glows before it becomes a hole.
Start from what a camera actually does. It is very good at recording differences in tone and colour, and very bad at recording the surface of a thing. Flat, even light — the light most listing photos are taken in, including ours, because it renders colour honestly — is precisely the light that erases texture.
So the faults in a used garment sort into two groups. The ones made of contrast are visible and you can judge them yourself. The ones made of texture are close to invisible and have to be asked about. Almost every disappointing secondhand purchase is a texture fault that nobody thought to mention, and knowing which group a fault belongs to is most of the skill.
Pilling
What it is. Short fibres work their way to the surface of a fabric, tangle under friction, and ball up. It is friction that causes it, so it appears in predictable places: under and around the arms, on the side of the body where a bag or a seatbelt rubs, on the inside of the thighs, at the cuffs and around the collar, and across the seat.
Whether you can see it. Barely, in a flat-lit photo of the front of a garment. What you can do is look at the silhouette — the edge of the garment against the backdrop — where a fuzzy, slightly furred outline gives it away, and look hard at the cuff and collar edges, which pill first and are usually in shot.
Whether it gets worse. It is mostly a first-season phenomenon. A garment that has already pilled and been de-pilled tends to settle down. It also matters what the fabric is: soft, loosely spun and blended yarns pill readily, tightly spun and long-fibre yarns much less.
What to do about it. A fabric comb or a battery shaver removes pills easily. The honest caveat is that shaving removes fibre, so a heavily pilled knit is also, slightly, a thinner knit afterwards. Once or twice is nothing. A garment that has clearly been shaved repeatedly is on its way to the next section.
Fading and colour loss
This is a contrast fault, which means you can settle it yourself without asking anybody anything. The technique is comparison against a hidden reference.
Every garment has areas that never saw daylight: the inside of a placket, the underside of a collar, the seam allowance, the inside of a pocket bag, the fabric under a belt loop. Find one of those in the photos and compare it with an exposed area. If they match, the colour is original. If the hidden part is noticeably deeper, you are looking at a faded garment, however even that fade looks.
Two patterns are worth telling apart. Even fade across the whole piece is wash fade — thousands of small abrasions, generally uniform, and on denim frequently the reason somebody wants the garment in the first place. Uneven fade is light damage: the shoulders and upper sleeves lighter than the body, or a hard line where the piece was folded over a hanger rail in a sunny room. Neither is reversible. Both are perfectly liveable if you know before you buy, and both should be reflected in what a piece is worth. Older stock in vintage almost always carries some of this, and a black cotton tee from decades ago that has gone slightly grey-green is behaving normally.
Thinning, and the window test
Thinning is the fault that costs people the most money, because it is invisible in a photo, invisible across a shop floor, and terminal. Fabric abrades from the inside as much as the outside, and once the weave is open the garment has a limited number of wears left no matter how good it looks.
It appears where a body presses: elbows, seat, knees, the fold of a collar, the shoulder blades of somebody who wore a backpack, the point of the hip on a jacket. It also appears where fabric rubs fabric, so check the inside of a trouser thigh.
There is one photograph that answers it completely, and it costs the seller nothing: the garment held up in front of a window or a lamp. Thin areas glow. A worn elbow lights up like a lamp shade while the rest of the sleeve stays solid. If you buy older cotton, older knitwear, or anything workwear, this is the single most valuable question you can ask, and we will happily take that photo of anything on our shelves.
Holes, and how to read the one you are looking at
Not all holes mean the same thing, and the shape usually tells you which kind you have.
- Moth damage. Small, roughly round holes, scattered rather than in a line, and only ever in protein fibres — wool, cashmere, mohair, alpaca, silk blends, feathers. Larvae feed where the fabric is soiled with sweat or food, so the damage clusters around the underarm, the collar and the front of a jumper rather than distributing evenly. Several small holes in a wool knit are far more likely to be moths than accidents.
- Wear holes. Oval rather than round, at a friction point, with a fuzzy halo of thinned fabric around them. These are the last stage of the previous section, which is why a thinning photo is worth more than a hole photo.
- Snags and pulls. A yarn has been dragged out of the weave but not broken. On a knit this is often correctable by easing the loop back through from the inside with a blunt needle. It is a much smaller problem than it looks in a close-up photo.
- Burns and melts. Synthetic fabric that has met heat has stiff, sometimes glossy edges and no fraying. It is not repairable in any invisible way.
Repairs and alterations
A repair is not automatically a fault. On workwear, on military surplus and on genuinely old pieces a period repair is part of the object, and on some garments it is the most interesting thing about them. What matters is knowing it is there.
The tells are almost always in the stitching. Look for a second line of stitching running parallel to a hem, thread that does not match the original in colour or weight, a side seam that has been closed and overlocked where the factory seam was pressed open, or a hem that sits at an unusual length for the era. Darning shows as a patch of denser texture. Iron-on repair patches on the inside of a knee or elbow show through as a rectangle in a backlit photo, which is another argument for asking for one.
The one that genuinely matters is a quiet alteration, because a taken-in garment no longer matches the size on its tag — and that is exactly the situation where the numbers save you. If a piece has been altered, the measurements describe it and the label does not; reading the flat-lay measurements is the fix.
Prints, coatings and hardware
Three specific things that behave differently from cloth.
Screen prints. A cracked print on an old graphic tee is usually desirable and stable — the ink has hardened and split along the flex lines but is still bonded to the fabric. Flaking is different: pieces of ink lifting at the edges, with bare fabric showing through in patches. Flaking spreads every time the garment is washed. Look at the edges of letters in a close-up, and if the photo cannot answer it, ask.
Coatings and elastic. Faux leather, rubberised prints and coated finishes eventually break down; the surface goes tacky, then crazes, then lifts. Old elastic does the same in a quieter way — waistbands and cuffs that have lost their recovery, and in a bad case the elastic crumbles out as dust. Neither can be undone. Any piece described as coated, rubberised or with an elasticated waist deserves a specific question about how the elastic behaves.
Zips and fasteners. Zip teeth photograph well and sliders do not, and the slider is the part that fails. A photo of the zip half open answers it. On bags and accessories the same rule applies with more force, because there the zip is often the only moving part.
The four questions worth asking
You do not need a checklist of twenty. These four cover the faults a photograph cannot show, and any seller who is describing goods honestly will be glad to answer them.
- Can I see it held up to the light?
- Is there pilling under the arms or on the seat?
- Has it been altered, and does it smell of anything — smoke, damp, storage?
- What do the cuffs, collar and hem look like close up?
Everything we sell is pre-owned, one of one, and photographed exactly as it is, flaws included — we describe condition, we do not grade or authenticate. If the answer to one of those questions is unflattering we would rather tell you than have it arrive as a surprise. Browse womenswear and menswear, and if a piece you already own has faults like these, the care guide covers how to stop them getting worse.