By Valentine Fabre
As the second-hand market has grown increasingly fast since 2020, the rise of online clothing resellers has created vivid debates across social media regarding its ethical and financial impact. Is online reselling really that bad, or are online discourses exaggerating its actual repercussions?
Who hasn’t scrolled endlessly through Vinted or Depop looking for the perfect second-hand/vintage garment to add to their closet, and felt rapidly appalled by the prices at which said garments were sold? Worried that finding the ultimate bargain may have become impossible? Well, for some - if not many, one the reasons these platforms have changed so much, are because of the online resellers. Awarded the nickname of “landlords of our generation”, resellers have become a controversial topic in a generation because of the unethical practices linked to them.
Driven by Gen-Z consumers, the second-hand market has risen by 149% between 2016 and 2022 and is expected to rise an extra 67.5% by 2026. As increasingly more people have begun to take an interest in the second-hand market, it appears to be a hopeful and refreshing consumer shift for the planet. Indeed, a circular economy is an efficient answer against fast fashion and overconsumption as a whole. So what is it about resellers that has awarded them the - derogatory - nickname of “fashion landlords”?
Across both Twitter and TikTok, resellers have been accused of being the cause of rising prices in charity shops, by reselling their items for significant profit. Hence making said items financially inaccessible to their intended target audience.
Reselling supporters often argue that thrift stores are already inaccessible to large amounts of people, as they require time and very often a vehicle (mainly in America where walking distances in big cities can be longer). However, transposing this same idea within British urbanisation and overall second-hand landscape makes this highly debunkable. The United Kingdom currently accounts for more than 11,200 charity shops across the country, including 9,000 in London, which total population equates to about 13.6% of the UK’s. More precisely, it was found that charity shops make up an average of about 7.7% of high streets across all regions. It is quite fair to say that in the United Kingdom, charity shops are rather accessible.
Meanwhile, resellers are accused of making significant margins on charity shop clothes by selling them four, five if not ten times the price at which they were purchased. Partisans of online reselling justify those margins by bringing up the labour behind each listing: the time going to second-hand marketplaces, spent skimming through hundreds of garments, the copywriting for each listing as well, as the overall invested energy. Yes, it is true that this may represent a significant workload, as any thrifting enthusiast would know the required patience behind finding second-hand gems. However, the question of legitimised labour can also be raised here, arguing to which extent raising prices to fit these labour costs become exploitative of vulnerabilities.
Whilst charity shops receive a lot more stock than they can handle and sell on a daily basis (a vast majority of donated items will still finish their life in a landfill), the amount of good quality garments they receive are very limited. This makes it challenging for consumers to skim through rails without finding a majority of items from Shein, Primark, H&M, and other fast fashion brands. What resellers defend as labour, seems to refer to what could be considered as the hoarding of good-quality items, available for a reasonable price. Is this labour stemming from a desire to shape an ethical fashion landscape, or rather from creating a scarcity of high-quality items?
When Oxfam, Mind, Scope, and Cancer Research - amongst others - were created, circular fashion wasn’t at the core of the concept, but rather helping people from lower economic backgrounds as well as reinvesting the profits for a chosen cause. As the interest in second-hand garments has grown to become what it is today, those charity shops have become a haven for fashion lovers looking to consume more sustainably, eventually leading to resellers as we know them today.
The controversial figure of the Depop reseller's movement - if we dare call it that - Jacklyn Wells (@jbwells2 on TikTok) has gone viral numerous times across many social media platforms for her thrifting hauls, showcasing the clothes to be sold on her Depop account. Through an apparent interest in the 90s and 00s fashion, the content creator/reseller shares regular thrift hauls, during which she shows everything she has bought throughout a certain given amount of time.
On April 6th, Wells posted a video during which she showcased 27 purchased items, a week and a half later, on April 18th, after coming back from a ‘thrifting trip,' the creator posted two parts of another thrifting haul that counted 52 pieces, accounting for a total of almost 80 garments. Whilst Wells admits to keeping some pieces for herself, everything else was put up for sale on her Depop account, with prices ranging from an average of $50 for denim trousers and maxi skirts, and between $40 and $100 for dresses. In total, the creator has sold over 2,810 items since last year, according to the first listing item (the platform does not give a very precise date of when the garment was posted.) Resellers are an active part of overconsumption, directly resulting from both Depop’s and Vinted’s marketing campaign that aims at pushing users to a constant selling/buying rotation.
It is true that as fashion consumers we need to redefine our relationships with prices as well as garments’ worth, however, the work of resellers is not compatible with the rehabilitation of accurately priced items. Rather, they have created a form of unnecessary labour, leading to clothing vulnerability and inaccessibility through hoarding. In the long run, resellers do not seem to be the ultimate sustainable answer for the fashion industry, but rather a capitalist detour from the actual problem: overconsumption.