Tunisia is my kind of country: great cheap food, complex history, long beaches and a national obsession with fripe: second-hand clothes. Despite my partner’s protests, I couldn’t end our holiday there without embracing all four.
The tents of Souk Bou Selsla stretch out across a square the size of 6 football pitches, covering hundreds of tables piled high with clothes right up to the point where they spill to the ground.
Like every market in the world, men with impressively loud voices yell over each other to promote their wares. Speaking neither Arabic nor French, I can only assume they were saying “SHIRTS, SIR? THIS TABLE: JUST £1! TOO UNFASHIONABLE, ONE ASSUMES, FOR BRITISH CHARITY SHOPS! WHILE THESE ARE £5 EACH, BUT, AS ONE CAN SEE FROM THE EXTANT TAGS: REJECTED FROM THE FACTORY!”
Fresh clothes arrive from the Western world in graded “bales” - 55kg plastic wrapped packages which are then slashed and spread on the tables attracting a new flurry of prospectors. The first movers will extract the Superdrys, Nikes and Ralph Laurens while the rest feel lucky for M&S at the same price.
I plunged my hands into a cotton mountain, instinctively feeling that the gold must be in the depths.
All in all, I bought 2 brand new pairs of achingly hip Carhartt trousers (RRP £200), a mix of good quality shirts, some Levis and new Lululemon leggings (RRP £88). All for about £20 (inc. Naive Tourist tax).
We wandered, dazed, to the next stall to find it not selling denim, but live chickens, stacked in crates, necks waiting to be wrung on demand. We did a quick 180.
I imagine each chicken hatched within a ten mile radius of its Final Destination, providing two dinners and a couscous stock before its carcass was considered trash.
My poor jeans, however, probably started life in a Chinese cotton field, demanding 2,565 litres of water and the sweat of hard labour, before they could be shipped to Turkey to be sewn into just the right pattern to pause a thumb on TikTok.
But maybe they arrived in Croydon just days too late: a trend had passed, demand waned and so, wrapped tightly with their other unloved Grade A friends, they were shipped to Tunisia. The indignity for these Levis is that this gawking tourist picked them up and decided that for £2.50 it was worth the excess baggage to schlep them right back home again to Croydon.
The irony is, because of our squeamishness, British charity shops can be even cheaper than fripe markets! For all the talk of Fast Fashion, our willingness to discard clothes isn’t the problem. It’s our aversion to picking them up again. The dopamine hit from shopping can be ours shame-free if we, like Tunisians, make the most of every outfit already made: our wardrobes still have plenty of meat on the bones.
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