SECOND-HAND CLOTHES AND DIFFUSION OF FASHIONS IN 15TH CENTURY VALENCIA

The development of a complex second-hand market in a large city such as Valencia in the Late Middle Ages is used here to analyse the clothing sector, and to establish how, and by what means, trading in already worn clothes served to bring the new fashions that were emerging from the mid-14th century onwards to wider sectors of the population. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the importance of the flea market in the diffusion of a certain consumerist spirit when the productive forces had not yet developed sufficiently to supply these new demands.