What Is Ukay-Ukay? The Meaning, the History, and Why It Is Technically Illegal in the Philippines

Every Filipino knows the word. Most have bought something from one. Very few could tell you where it came from, why a 1966 law still technically bans it, or how a Cebuano verb for digging became the national word for second-hand clothes. So here it is, start to finish.

What the word means

Ukay is a Cebuano (Bisaya) verb. It means to dig, or to sift through. Say it twice, ukay-ukay, and the doubling does what it does across Philippine languages: it makes the action repeated, casual, ongoing. Digging and digging. That’s exactly what you do at a traditional stall, bent over a table of unsorted clothes. The word has come to mean the stall, the clothes on it, the activity, and the whole trade.

The nearest English is “thrifting” or “thrift store”, and Filipinos use those too, more and more for the sorted, boutique end of the market. But ukay-ukay carries something “thrift” doesn’t. The pile. The price card. The hunt. It’s a Cebuano word the rest of the country adopted, which makes Cebu the linguistic home of Philippine thrifting even though Baguio was the commercial one.

Wagwag, segunda mano and the other names

• Wagwag is the Ilocano and northern term, from shaking the dust off a garment. It was the common word in Baguio and the Cordillera in the 1990s, before ukay-ukay spread nationally in the early 2000s.
• Segunda mano (“second hand”, from Spanish) is the neutral term for anything used.
• SM is the joke version: a pun on segunda mano and the SM malls. “Where did you get that?” “SM.”
• Ukay on its own, as in “ukay ta” (let’s thrift), is how Cebu says it in conversation. The thrift market Ukay ta Bai is that phrase with a friendly “bai” on the end.
• Preloved and thrifted are the newer, softer words, used by online sellers and boutiques. We pull the differences apart in our glossary.

How it started in Baguio

The trade began in Baguio City in the early 1980s, and it began as charity. The Philippines gets around twenty typhoons a year. After the worst of them, organisations including the Salvation Army shipped in used clothing as relief. More arrived than could be given away. Traders bought the surplus in bulk and sold it cheaply, first to Baguio’s poorer residents and then, as word got around, to anyone. The Senate’s own committee papers from the 2023 hearings tell it the same way: the business “started in the early 1980s in Baguio due to the frequency of natural calamities in the country.”

Wikipedia credits Evangeline Dis-iw Colod and her family with turning that surplus into a business in the mid-1990s, and describes it as an early kind of social enterprise aimed at people who couldn’t afford new clothes. From Baguio the trade followed the mountain roads down to Metro Manila, and by the early 2000s there were ukay stalls in every city in the country. Somewhere on that journey the Ilocano wagwag gave way to the Cebuano ukay-ukay.

Where the clothes come from

Mostly not from Filipino wardrobes. The stock in a Cebu ukay stall has usually crossed an ocean. The main sources are Japan and South Korea (prized for condition and for the smaller sizes), the United States (volume, workwear, vintage tees), Australia, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. The Freeman reported in March 2025 that the National Bureau of Investigation’s Region 7 office had just seized 228 bales and was trying “to identify the import channel and method used to illegally bring these in to Cebu City from South Korea.” That tells you two things at once. Where the clothes come from, and that the import ban does occasionally get enforced.

Upstream, the supply is the world’s donation bins and textile recyclers. Clothes donated in Osaka or Sydney that can’t be sold locally get bought by the tonne by export sorters, graded (A for near-new, B for worn, C for rag), pressed into 45-, 80- or 100-kilogram bales, and shipped. The Freeman puts the global flow at “over a US$1 billion worth” a year, and the Philippines is one of Asia’s biggest destinations.

The bale, and how the trade works

The unit of the trade is the bale. A pressed sack of one category: men’s tees, ladies’ blouses, kids’ mixed, jackets, jeans, shoes. A supplier in Cebu (there are several around Leon Kilat and Colon Street, see our ukay guide) sells bales by origin and grade. A stall owner buys one, cuts the strapping, and sorts. The best pieces go on hangers at ₱150. The middle goes onto the ₱50 table. The rest goes into the ₱10 pile, or on to another seller. A smaller, pre-sorted “bundle” lets someone start with a few thousand pesos, which is why “bale ukay” and “ukay bundle” are among the most-searched phrases in the whole category. They are the keywords of people about to open a stall.

The sorted thrift shops that have opened in Cebu since around 2020 sit on the same chain, one step further along. A Carbon vendor of twenty years told Sugbo.ph in 2025 that the new shops are her direct competitors and buy their supplies from stalls like hers. They wash, steam, style and photograph the top grade and sell it at ₱300 to ₱1,500 to a customer who is paying for the sorting. Same clothes. Different job done.

The law: Republic Act 4653

On 17 June 1966, Congress passed Republic Act No. 4653, “An Act to Safeguard the Health of the People and Maintain the Dignity of the Nation by Declaring It a National Policy to Prohibit the Commercial Importation of Textile Articles Commonly Known as Used Clothing and Rags.” The title is the whole argument. Used clothes were thought to carry disease, and a young republic didn’t want to be seen wearing other nations’ cast-offs.

What the text of the law actually says:

• Commercial importation of used clothing and rags is prohibited.
• Section 2 sets the penalty: a fine of “not less than two hundred pesos nor more than twenty thousand pesos” and imprisonment of two to five years. Foreigners are deported.
• Confiscated goods are to be burned in front of representatives of the General Auditing Office, the Department of Finance and the Office of the President.
• The ban is on importation for commercial use. Selling used clothing already in the country is not covered.

A separate provision, Section 105(v) of the old Tariff and Customs Code (Republic Act 1937), allows used clothing in as donations for relief or for non-profit work. That’s the door the relief goods came through in the 1980s, and The Freeman calls it the “small window of opportunity” the trade is widely assumed to still use.

So is ukay-ukay illegal?

The enforcers admit the gap. The Palawan Daily News quotes a police official on it: “Our focus is the imported used clothing that is obviously and physically seen because it is difficult for the enforcers to identify if it is already hanged in the stores. Although it is prohibited, we cannot prove it.” Customs seizes containers when it finds them. The NBI’s 228 bales in Cebu are a recent example. Between the port and the rack, though, the law goes quiet, and city governments issue permits to ukay stalls the way they do to any other shop. You end up with a legal trade in illegally imported goods, which is what “technically illegal” means here.

The bills to legalise it

People have been trying to fix the contradiction for at least fifteen years.

• 2010: Customs Commissioner Angelito Alvarez publicly backed legalising and taxing the trade.
• 2014: House Bill 4055, filed by Representatives Rufus Rodriguez and Maximo Rodriguez, proposed legalisation and estimated ₱700 million a year in taxes and duties.
• 2015: Baguio City Councillor Betty Lourdes Tabanda pushed a local resolution, arguing ukay was a source of income for Baguio residents and a driver of tourism.
• 2022: Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, chairing the ways and means committee, said it was time to review RA 4653 and told Customs to work with local governments on awareness that ukay imports are restricted.
• February 2023: Senator Raffy Tulfo filed Senate Bill 1778 to repeal RA 4653 and regulate the trade. “The ‘ukay-ukay’ industry has evolved as part of Filipino culture,” the bill says. “It goes without saying that the revenue-generating industry has generated jobs for our fellow Filipinos.” SunStar put the trade at ₱18 billion.

As of The Freeman’s March 2025 report the bill had not moved, and we found no change in 2026. RA 4653 has now stood for sixty years.

For and against

For legalisation: the trade exists, it employs tens of thousands of people, it clothes millions cheaply, and it pays no import duty. Legalising it would raise revenue, allow sanitary inspection of imports, and end the odd situation of permitted shops selling prohibited goods. Tulfo’s cultural point is fair too. Ukay is a national habit, not a loophole.

Against: local garment makers. The Freeman’s 2025 piece names the shoemakers of Carcar City in Cebu and the garment makers of Loon, Bohol, as the kind of home-based producers who can’t compete with a ₱25 imported tee, and argues that unregulated legalisation “is not the kind of globalization that encourages trade among countries like the Philippines.” Legal scholars writing about “waste colonialism” make a wider version of the same case: the used-clothing trade lets rich countries export their fast-fashion problem to poor ones.

Both sides have a point, which is why the law hasn’t moved. The market has, though.

Ukay-ukay today

The ukay stall of 1995 still exists, and in Cebu it still thrives at Carbon, on Colon, at Tabada Market and on every barangay corner. But since around 2020 the word has stretched to cover something new. Sorted thrift shops with Instagram accounts, steamed racks, fitting rooms and prices ten times the pile. The Great Finds at Raintree Mall, Y2K Vintage on Molave Street, 3rd Junction on Junquera. These are ukay in supply chain and “thrift” in presentation, and the people shopping in them use both words without embarrassment. The co-founder of Ukay ta Bai put it this way to SunStar in 2024: “Gone are the days when ‘ukay’ was seen as ‘bati’.” Bati is Bisaya for ugly.

Sugbo.ph’s July 2025 piece on the change talked to both sides. Carbon vendors with twenty years at the same table, and shoppers who go to the boutiques when they’re short on time and back to the stalls when they’re not. Its conclusion was that the two need each other, and that the city should make sure the new doesn’t push out the old. We agree. If you want to see both in a day, our ukay guide and our top five are the two halves of the same walk.

And the third form of the trade, the one this site exists for, is the newest. Filipinos selling their own worn-once clothes to each other. No bale, no ocean. That’s second-hand fashion the 1966 law never imagined and couldn’t object to. It’s also what “preloved” means.