As the oldest kid I didn’t wear many used clothes. I was also the oldest cousin in my town, so not many passed over there. But a couple times there were coats from other families, and it didn’t bother me any, I barely noticed.
I’ve purchased a few jackets and coats at thrift stores. They are always in good shape, and would have originally been better than what I would have purchased new. Used clothes or hand me downs are okay.
Yeah. My tricycle went to my little brother, then to a neighbor kid, then to the neighbor kid’s little brother, then got backed over by the neighbor’s car (no one was riding the trike at the time). My niece is currently playing with some toys that my brother and I played with when we were kids - that we inherited from my mother and her sister.
I loved getting hand-me-downs!
I am the oldest of my siblings, but I had four older girl cousins. They were a bit more well off that we were and wore “brand name” clothing. I was stuck with Sears or K-Mart brands most of the time. So when my aunt sent a bag of hand-me-downs home with us after a visit, it was my only real chance for Dittos, Gunne Sax, Esprit, Jordache, etc.
You mean like this thread? 
Sorry – I couldn’t help myself.
I didn’t mind the clothes/toys/things much; in most ways they were new to me and beat some of the things I (literally and no kidding) pulled out of the town dump. In our family it wasn’t just from my brother but we passed things around out to second cousins. And most of the things I outgrew got passed around. We still had the “extended family” Hudson Hornet that served as a first car for maybe a dozen of us from the late 60s until the late 90s when it got to beyond even our ability to salvage and hand off. Some things I even still get to see being used now by third and fourth generation relatives and that gives me some warm thoughts.
One thing always bothered me; I even got a hand-me-down birthday. My brother and I were born 11 years and some minutes apart. I will claim to my last breath that it was because our mother was that bad of a cook - none of us could have survived two of her cakes a year. But it really did bother me. His party was usually first and mine was leftovers basically so he and his friends, being older, could go out and do stuff. And because of the age differences there wasn’t combining the two much after I turned 3 or 4. For some reason that always just irked the Hell out of me.
Never got hand me down toys that I remember. Did get hand-me-down clothes, but they were “play clothes” for the most part, not school clothes. And they didn’t make up the bulk of my wardrobe (at least not after I was old enough to remember - I know my family had less money before my mom went back to work when I was in kindergarten). And with the only batch I really remember specifically (was probably tween-age with that being the last hand-me downs I had, as wasn’t similarly sized or shaped to cousins as adult/teenager), it was “go through and see what you like” and the rest got passed on (not sure if to relatives or goodwill or something similar).
Both of my parents had a set of sibs like that. Mom’s youngest sister was born on her oldest’s 20th birthday. Dad’s younger brother was born on his oldest’s 12th birthday.
Yes! We had our school uniforms and then “play clothes” from Caldor and a couple of dress-up outfits for church. My mom had a friend who would hand down her family’s leftovers and it was gold mine of cool stuff we wouldn’t have had access too.
We thought of them about the same way that a fish thinks of water. We’d probably have been pretty surprised to learn of anyone who didn’t have hand-me-down everything.
I wore some hand-me-downs from my sister, and I liked them. (She’s 8 1/2 years older, so it was so cool.)
This is my experience exactly! I had older cousins who were wealthy, and I loved getting a big box in the mail from Aunt Julie full of lovely dresses with matching coats and cute little shorts sets that came from fancy little girly shops that my mother couldn’t afford to set foot in. And they always smelled of cedar, as the closets in their house were all lined with cedar.
To this day when I smell cedar I am triggered to get new clothes!
Well as a poor family who only got new clothes at Christmas, hand me downs were part of life. 90% of my shirts and jeans were second hand. Interestingly enough, although I remember being very embarassed eating government cheese and using food stamps, I never felt self concious about hand me downs.
Kopec, no kidding, this is an old thread!
But since it’s been resurrected I’ll play. Being the youngest I was the hand me down kid until about 7th grade. About that time several siblings moved out and my dad was making pretty good money. Me and my brother got several new outfits for school that year. After getting my own clothes I did not want to go back to used crap!
HATE THEM WITH THE POWER OF A THOUSAND SUNS!!! I had an older sister and older neighbor girls across the street that would give us hand-me downs.
My first bra was a hand me down from the neighbors. When I started Junior High and was in the locker room for gym I was the only one still wearing an undershirt, this was in 1970, and I wanted to sink through the floor. So I was grateful for that one hand me down, but hated all the rest. When I started babysitting a few years later all my earnings were spent on clothes.
My mother was another one who, when she did buy clothes for me, it was only her opinion that mattered, and not mine at all.
I was lucky 
My Mom hated shopping and wasn’t good at decision-making so I got to go on my own as a teenager (once I was in high school and we didn’t wear uniforms there) with my Christmas munny to buy my own clothes. It’s the only compliment I can remember my father ever giving me – something to the effect that I made good choices when buying clothes for myself.
I got clothes from two slightly older cousins. I liked it fine, my aunt bought nice stuff and I like clothes. however, my mom made me clothes and my favorite and best remembered were things she made me (and later things, I made me) i.e. I don’t remember many specific outfits I got as hand me downs but I remember a lot of outfits my mom made. the earliest was when I was about 5 and I had a red velvet jumper with white satin ribbon and a big satin bow at hip level. I thought I was a present. 
Me, too, but it was second cousins. There was usually a warm glow among the adults that the family was getting one over the universe by cooperating like that. Today my DIL is part of a group of family and friends that circulate boxes. The idea being that babies and toddlers grow out of their clothes way to quickly not to circulate boxes. It also leaves them with more money to spend on the few things they buy to add to the boxes. That’s how the batman princess dress got added.
We’ll see if it changes when their kids get older. They might rely on it less, but I doubt it will go away.
My sister and I are just shaped differently, so I don’t remember wearing any hand-me-downs from her. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; I just don’t remember.
I do remember being made to wear my step-sisters’ hand-me-downs and that was a problem because the youngest was ten years older than me, so in that decade between us, the styles had changed so radically that I was just a sitting duck target for bullies in middle school. In the 80s, everything was tapered legs and pegged ankles and popped collars, all preppy preppy. My step-sisters’ stuff was all peasant shirts and low-rise bell bottoms. Did not go over well. I learned to sew because I learned how to taper the legs of the jeans down and then I’d wear a long button-down shirt to hide the low-rise waist band. Still got bullied mercilessly because none of it was designer and Izod and Jordache and all that were the rage at the time. I wore Keds instead of Nikes. It was humiliating. Saved up my lunch money and baby sitting money for months to buy a pair of Nikes. My parents refused to buy new clothes because “There’s a closet full of nice clothing upstairs. Why don’t you go through that and wear that stuff?”
I had this one really close friend who I think just bought me a pair of Jordache. I was over at her house and she handed me this pair of jeans and said they didn’t fit her right so I could have them. I checked with her mom because I knew my dad would lose his mind if I came home with a $50 pair of jeans mysteriously. Her mom confirmed, yes I could have them. A few weeks later, my friend turned up at school with a suspiciously similar pair of Jordache jeans that fit her exactly the same as the pair she’d given me. In retrospect, I think maybe she and her mom came up with that scheme to help me out with the bullying.
Hand-me-down or used clothing that’s still in style I have no problem with. I’ve traded/exchanged clothes with my girlfriends since high school. In fact, I just traded dresses with a good friend of mine a couple weeks ago. And of course, now I know how to sew, so I can make my own alterations if necessary and also. Nobody cares what brand names I’m wearing anymore. Nor do I have any fucks to give about other peoples’ opinions of my fashion choices.
My mother is the youngest of 4 sisters, her oldest sister is almost 20 years older. I am her youngest child, thus I am the youngest person in my generation of the family. Three of the sisters stayed in the area so I have 2 siblings and 8 cousins that we would see regularly. I was born in the late 70s, and my oldest cousins are at least 20 years older than me, so until I was in about 7th grade ALL of my clothes were handed down, much of it from the 70s, some of it from the 60s!
Yeah, I was “that kid in the weird clothes” all of elementary school. I was also usually one of only three Asian kids in the entire school, and the other two were my siblings. I did not have anything near the confidence to make either of those things work for me socially, so I was quite unpopular until high school. Whatever. It built character, I suppose.
I was the oldest in my family - no older siblings or cousins - so the handful of hand-me-downs I got were parental clothes once I was big enough to wear them.
One was my favourite shirt for a while, but that’s the only one I can remember, offhand, though I’m pretty sure I inherited a couple jackets as well.