Haiti’s Secondhand Clothes Industry

Orli from PSFK has a blog post about a documentary, Secondhand Pepe.

In Haiti, there’s a whole industry that revolves around used clothing. The clothes, the markets that sell them, the industry, and the vendors are all known as “pepe.” Clothes have flowed from the US to Haiti since the 1960s, but the origin of secondhand shopping goes much further. “Secondhand (Pepe)” is a 24 minute trilingual documentary film that explores the role of secondhand clothes in diaspora countries, from the Eastern European immigrant Jews in the early 1900s to the function of “pepe” in contemporary Haitian culture and economy.