The State of Style 2026

In 1947, a small shop opened on Broad Street in Oxford, selling donated goods to raise money for post-war relief. It's widely believed to be the world's first-ever permanent charity shop – and it was Oxfam's.

There was no language yet for ‘sustainable fashion’, it was simply that clothes with life left in them were passed on to raise funds for people in need.

Nearly eight decades on, that idea hasn't changed – only the scale of it. Oxfam now runs over 500 shops across the UK, together helping fund our work in more than 75 countries.

Every second-hand donation and sale still does exactly what it did on Broad Street: turning something no longer needed into practical support for people facing poverty and climate crises – from helping families access clean water to supporting farmers recovering from floods and droughts, and communities preparing for future climate shocks.

Before the algorithms, before it was fashionable, that's where second-hand started. Not as a trend to follow, but as a genuinely original way of doing good, to help create a fairer world.

A brief timeline

• 1947 – Oxfam's first shop opens on Broad Street, Oxford
• 1974 – Our first ever ‘nearly new’ fashion show takes place, encouraging second hand shopping
• 1994 – The first Oxfam Festival Shop opens at Glastonbury Festival
• 1996 – Oxfam’s ‘clothes code’ campaign launches, calling for retailers to adopt a basic code of rights for those working in the clothing industry
• 2007 – Oxfam's online shop launches, the first dedicated charity ecommerce site
• 2017 – Our first-ever runway show, ‘Fashion Fighting Poverty’, takes place during London Fashion Week
• 2019 – Second Hand September launches
• 2025 – Oxfam high street and online shops raised almost £100m to fight poverty, inequality, and injustice around the world
• 2026 – Oxfam Rental launches, the UK’s first national charity-backed clothing rental service

Every item of clothing requires raw materials, energy, labour and water to produce. And when clothes are worn only a handful of times – or not at all – those resources are effectively wasted.

Take water. The fashion industry uses around 93 billion cubic metres of water every year globally: the equivalent of 37 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. In the UK, the clothing we buy each year has a water footprint of around 8 billion cubic metres, enough to meet the UK's water needs for two years. Producing a single pair of jeans takes around 16,000 litres of water.

Water is increasingly both an environmental and humanitarian challenge. Today, 2.3 billion people live in water-stressed countries, 1.8 billion lack access to safe water at home, and nine in ten climate-related disasters are linked to water – through floods, droughts, or changing rainfall patterns.

Extending the life of our clothes helps to reduce demand for new production and the resources it requires.

The State of Style is the first in an annual series. Each year, Oxfam will build on this evidence base to track how Britain's relationship with fashion evolves, creating a richer understanding of the choices we make, the systems that shape them and the opportunities to build a fashion future that is more individual, more circular and more sustainable.