India, Sept. 3 -- A red dress in Mumbai has already lived three lives.

Its first owner wore it the evening she met the man she would marry. Its second and third each wore it to a date that went exceptionally well. That's when it got its nickname on the resale-tech platform Relove (which lets fashion brands run secondhand marketplaces on their own websites): The lucky red dress.

Put like that, who wouldn't want to wear it next?

The dress and its story offer an interesting snapshot of major shifts in the resale and preloved markets in India, over the past decade.

We've gone from informal second-hand wear that felt like a punishment to the era of discount bins for designer lehengas (which let the buyer acquire something they could never ...