Judging a used garment means checking the parts that cannot be replaced

Sort faults into fixable and terminal

A used garment usually arrives with several small problems and the useful question is not how many but which kind. Missing buttons, a failed zip, a hem coming down, a stain, a lining torn at the underarm — all of these are repairs with known costs and predictable results.

A handful of things are not. Fabric that has thinned across a whole area, a shoulder that is the wrong width, colour that has faded unevenly, a garment that has been altered badly and cut down, permanent odour in a lining. These either cannot be reversed or cost more than the garment could ever justify.

So the inspection is a triage rather than a hunt for perfection. Ignore what a needle can fix, and spend the time on the things that decide whether the garment has a future at all.

Fit first, because fit is what alterations cannot always deliver

The shoulder width on a structured jacket is close to fixed, since moving it means detaching and resetting the sleeves and recutting the armhole, which is expensive and often unsatisfactory. If the shoulder is wrong, nothing below it can be made right.

Trouser rise is similarly fixed, and so is the total length of a garment once the hem allowance has been used. Sleeve length, waist, side seams and hems are all straightforwardly adjustable within the cloth available.

This inverts the usual instinct. It is fine to buy something too big through the body and have it taken in. It is a mistake to buy something that fits at the chest and is wrong at the shoulder, and that mistake is the most common one in secondhand buying.

Check the wear zones, not the whole garment

Fabric fails in predictable places, so hold the garment up to a window and look through those places specifically: elbows, the seat, the inside thigh, the collar fold, cuff edges, and the area under a bag strap.

Light passing through where it should not is the sign to trust. Thin fabric is on its way to becoming a hole, and a hole in the middle of a thinned area cannot be repaired durably, because there is nothing sound alongside it for the stitching to grip.

On a knitted garment, look at the same zones for pilling and for stretched, slack fabric that no longer springs back. Pills can be removed. Stretched-out cuffs and a droopy neckband are structural and, in cotton especially, permanent.

Look at what a previous alteration did

Turn the garment inside out and look at the seams. Uneven stitching, a taken-in seam with the original stitch line still visible, or a seam allowance trimmed away to almost nothing all tell you the piece has already been adjusted once.

That is not automatically bad, but it removes options. A garment already taken in has spent its allowance and cannot easily be let back out, so it fits whoever it was altered for and probably not you.

Look too for a hem that has been let down: a fold line, a stripe of unfaded colour, or a row of old needle holes. Both directions of alteration leave marks and both tell you how much adjustment is left in the cloth.

Smell, stains and what actually comes out

Odour deserves more weight than people give it. Smoke and mustiness will usually clear with airing, washing or professional cleaning. Odour that has soaked into the lining and the padding of a structured garment, or into leather, frequently does not, and there is no reliable domestic fix.

Stains divide by chemistry rather than by appearance. Old oil-based marks and anything that has been heat-set by a previous owner's dryer are the hardest. Water-based stains, even old ones, come out more often than they look as though they will.

Underarm discolouration on a white shirt is a specific case worth recognising, because it is usually a reaction between residues and the fabric that has built up over time, and it is generally permanent rather than merely stubborn.

Pricing the repair into the purchase

The only sound way to buy secondhand is to add the cost of the work to the price before deciding. A jacket that needs sleeves shortened, a lining patched and buttons replaced has a real price that includes all of that, and it may still be excellent value or may not.

A few repairs are so cheap they barely count: buttons, hems, a zip slider, a taken-in waist. Others are substantial: a full lining replacement, a resole, sleeve shortening on a jacket with working cuff buttons, any shoulder work.

What tips the balance is cloth. A garment in genuinely good fabric with a sound structure is worth spending on, because the expensive part is already there and the repairs are restoring access to it. A garment in mediocre cloth is not worth the same money however cheap it was to begin with.