The Hidden Cost of Expensive Second-Hand Clothing.

In the article, “Is Depop Gentrifying Secondhand Shopping?”, Hattie Rex discusses resellers on Depop, one of the largest online clothing resale platforms. She explains how they have become infamous recently for inflating prices on second-hand garments and generally exploiting a method of shopping that has now become inaccessible for those who rely on it most. This controversy comes from the idea that second-hand shopping is no longer just about extending the life of a garment at a reasonable price but has become a trendy and highly lucrative marketplace.

Is this sight becoming reserved only for the wealthy?
"SPCA Thrift Shop" by Rusty Clark ~ 100K photos is licensed CC BY 2.0

How does this affect the vintage fashion community?

Rex does a thorough job in covering the positive and negative perspectives surrounding the topic, but there is one thing that I would like to expand on more as I think it’s particularly relevant to this blog. That is, that some of these online resellers are exploiting the ‘vintage style’ trend by using a ‘vintage’ tag on an item simply to bump up the price of a garment. There is no guarantee that the piece is genuinely high-quality vintage and not fast fashion deception, this leaving the responsibility up to us as buyers of second-hand garments to determine what the true origins are.

This is relevant for a lot of us in the community as we rely heavily on second-hand shopping, given that true vintage pieces are already pricey and hard to come by. However, with inflated prices as well as a competitive resell market in addition to this, it’s leaving many of us unsure about the future of sustainable and cheap vintage clothing. Perhaps we should avoid buying clothes all together and instead take some notes out of Bianca Esposito’s book and start sewing our vintage clothing instead. Would this be more ethical and potentially save a lot of us from overbuying?

 

Future implications.  

Although running an online resale business simply to exploit trends may seem unethical, can we really blame them? Or is that ignorant, as the issues that stem from this could encourage a new wave of unsustainable and insensitive fashion culture? The morality of fashion is a tricky subject to dissect as there are hypocrisies everywhere. This is something Rex conveys well; that we should not oversimplify the issue, nor provide an idealistic solution, as there are deeper issues that we must tackle first.