What is ukay-ukay?
Simply put, ukay-ukay is thrifting/thrift-store shopping, Philippine-style. I say “Philippine style” because ukay stores are not so much clean, brightly-lit places like the ones you see in malls as they are hole-in-the-wall outlets that are often dusty and disorganized. Clothes are generally arranged according to tops, dresses, jeans, etc., but there are racks and racks of them and sometimes, piles and piles of them. Which is why the thrift-store shopping experience is called ukay. The word ukay is a Visayan word that literally means “to dig through” (source: my mom, who speaks Bisaya) and ukay-ukay shopping can sometimes involve hours of wading through junk (and suffering from sneezing fits) to find dirt-cheap fashion gems.
Is it worth it? HELL YES.
Me ukay-ukay shopping with my sister, sometime 2003
I’ve been going to ukay-ukay shops ever since I was 12 or 13. Back then, ukay-ukay was a phenomenon you could only find in Baguio. I had aunts who knew all the best ukay places in the city and during a visit to Baguio, they took me there to buy jackets for a trip to the States. I went absolutely nuts, grabbing everything that caught my eye and feeling no guilt for paying 100 pesos (about $2) for a top. I’m 22 now and I still wear some of the clothes I bought back then.
Ukay-ukay is a very big part of my lifestyle, and it’s not because I want to be “cool”, an “indie (a word I hate) fashionista (a word I hate even more)”, or “different” (though it is a huge plus that pretty much every item there is one-of-a-kind). Believe it or not, there’s a political reason behind restricting my shopping to secondhand items. I believe ukay shopping is a way of resisting the consumerist logic of today. People don’t really need a top that costs P800 or a pair of jeans that cost P3,000, but we buy them anyway. Why? Because we are all advertising targets who are led to think that filling up our wardrobes with overpriced (but mass-produced!) clothes is the only way we can feel good and go about “expressing our individuality and style”. By buying into this logic - not just with clothes, but with other consumer goods like electronics - we nourish the roots and turn a blind eye to a transnational economic system that exploits labor with capital.
Encouraging a more informed consumer lifestyle is part of what I hope to achieve with this blog, but I don’t mean for Ukay Manila to be a venue for my “radical” thoughts. I just want to be able to share my awesome ukay finds with my friends and with the world. 
So yay, welcome! I hope I can actually get around to posting regularly, haha.
Grab some of the best ukay finds for yourself at the Ukay Manila Store!
December 8th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
maybe you should show one of your oldest ukay finds that dates back to your high school days.
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December 11th, 2008 at 11:05 am
[...] why I say this blog is “politically motivated”. I wrote a short introductory post on ukay-ukay to kind of contextualize the blog and I hope it makes some sort of [...]
December 11th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
me and my sis love the ukay, mostly because we hate being “uso” and looking like everyone else.
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February 23rd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
[...] from my mother-in-law who lives somewhere in Benguet. It was circa 1992. Just so everyone knows what ukay-ukay means, let me quote my daughter: Simply put, ukay-ukay is thrifting/thrift-store shopping, [...]
March 21st, 2009 at 4:21 am
the politics contained is somehow acceptable. But it dwells on the comfort close to conformity.
1. this is precisely multi-culturalism- reducing the battle in its appearance (and that is through the nemesis of consuming to be anti-consumerism)
2. As heidegger would put it- this is a vicious paradox: trying to solve capitalism through capitalism is the most dangerous stance to be in its horizon
3. ukay ukay in the Phils., to give you some history here, came from Salvation Army: a project in US to bargain clothes for the people at the lower social strata. But it shifted to the interests of the petty-bourgeois class in pursuit of the vintage fad.
hoping to be more radical. thanks
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Lauren Reply:
March 21st, 2009 at 8:19 am
Yes, I am aware of the paradox in “alternative” consumerism, and that this is no solution to the contradictions of capitalism. But let’s face it - human beings ARE consumers. We need to consume to survive. And one person can’t possibly stop buying commodities and do EVERYTHING himself (eg. grow his own food, spin his own thread, etc) in order to be anti-consumerist. Maybe I’m a crappy Marxist for thinking this, but I like clothes, I like shopping, I like being well dressed, and I like putting clothes together. Ukay-ukay shopping is the lesser evil I can think of, one that I’m comfortable with.
Also, I didn’t know that ukay things came from the Salvation army - I know they’re relief goods from somewhere. And hey, not all of the petty-bourgeois who patronize ukays do it to be hip. Some of us are really just cheap bastards who don’t want to spend more than a few hundred pesos on an item of clothing. And in the global scheme of things, the Philippines is part of the lower classes of the world.
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