I didn’t really understand the value of eBay until a friend showed me her Watch List. She scrolled through an archive of Junya, Comme and Dior as if she were sifting through her own closet of carefully curated finds. Now, when I’m tired or stoned or just thirsty for something new, I’ll hunt through streams of blurry images in search of Cavalli animal prints and vintage Galliano. I fav a $40,000 rhinestone encrusted Tom Ford for Gucci jacket and stilettos that won’t fit. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to buy them anyway.

Once the domain of savvy collectors and aspirational housewives in search of affordable monogram, resale shopping apps like eBay and Poshmark have since become a two billion dollar industry catering to everyone from millennials seeking to tap into the growing gig economy, to Supreme junkies in search of the latest drop.

Across the web, the joys of recommerce are sold through creative copy in apps and on news sites like Forbes, who peddle the promise of neoliberalism with headlines like ‘Do You Have a Hidden Side-Hustle in Your Closet?’¹ For the eco-conscious and Kondo-savvy, repurposing used goods is only natural, and so is making money online. But for the fashion-obsessed, resale apps offer more than discount designer. Aspiring stylists and archivists use sites like eBay to uncover lesser-known brands or rare items from established designers, utilising their discovery mechanisms as portals into more in-depth explorations of old trends or runway shows.

Curated apps, like Grailed and The RealReal, help buyers and collectors gauge the value of goods — like this season’s ‘must-have’ Margiela tabis² — encouraging users to participate in circular economies of style: the incessant buying and selling of used goods as a means to consume more. But within these regenerative shopping networks there’s another, arguably more democratic, trend emerging, one that often eliminates the need to buy things altogether. It’s the practice of saving items to likes, carts, and online wish lists — what I like to call ‘virtual shopping.’

Like Instagram and Pinterest, resale apps can be used as mood boards, enabling users to virtually collect goods as a means to generate new identities on and offline. According to a 2013 study by consumer culture scholars Mike Molesworth and Janice Denegri-Knott titled Digital Virtual Consumption as Transformative Space, these temporary states of ownership, like saving a pair of Dr Martens on Depop, enable users to ‘initiate a journey of self-knowing through object knowing.’³ In other words, we no longer have to buy things to feel their impact on our sense of self; we can just save them to our wish lists instead.

For today’s shoppers, discovery is half the fun of online shopping, especially when it comes to searching for used items — things not everyone can find in stores. But just like vintage shopping IRL, virtual shopping can simulate longing, anxiety and a feeling of missed opportunity. But according to Denegri-Knott, it can also help enhance our self-esteem, promote ethical consumption and deliver new modes of enjoyment and pleasure.⁴ If we can participate in fashion in the same way that we play video games, then our opportunities for personal exploration via resale apps should be as vast as the sandbox worlds that mirror them.

In the world of recommerce, virtual shopping is the new consumerism that everyone can afford. But do resale apps really change the way we shop? Can they free us from our physical enslavement to consumerism? Or do they compel us to dive deeper into a cycle of buying and selling goods, rendering every image, object and aspiration in our lives as something to be consumed and resold?

Virtual shopping exists within a liminoid space, what cultural theorist Rob Shields defines as a meeting point of the imaginary and the material.⁵ Like window shopping, this in-between mode of consumption encourages fantasy and play, but it can also simulate aspirational desires, like the need to consume above your means. In his book The Empire of Things, historian Frank Trentmann describes how social innovation at the turn of the twentieth century resulted in the development of advanced technologies that triggered new modes of consumption, similar to the effects of online shopping today.⁶ In fin de siècle Paris, he says, newly constructed grand boulevards facilitated the orderly flow of goods and people, blurring commercial and public space with brightly lit storefronts that acted as extensions of main traffic arteries.⁷ For the first time, luxury items were on display for the masses, expanding desires for previously unattainable goods. Household objects, priced cheaper to encourage accelerated turnover, were no longer purchased solely for their utility, but also for their ability to signal wealth and status.

This surge in consumerism, defined as ‘conspicuous consumption’ by Thorstein Veblen in 1899, put new pressures on women, who were then responsible not only for the cooking and cleaning, but also for purchasing clothing and housewares that reflected familial status and smarts. For the average consumer, this included silk dresses, tapestries, and newly available knick knacks from overseas. For the elite, this meant sourcing antiques and hard to find collectables, luxury goods that weren’t yet available to the masses.

Today’s shoppers similarly perform mental and physical labour in order to achieve idealised luxury lifestyles both online and IRL. Buyers and sellers on resale apps act as entrepreneurial subjects, sifting through blogs, Pinterest boards, and influencer accounts in order to uncover the most compelling trends and the looks that mirror them. This neoliberal encroachment of production onto all facets of consumer behaviour has resulted in the proliferation of what scholar Elizabeth Wissinger refers to as glamour labour, ‘the body work to manage appearance in person and the online image work to create and maintain one’s “cool” quotient — how hooked up, tuned in, and “in the know” one is.’⁸

As our real-life identities become blurred with those of our online avatars, so do our notions of work and play, and nowhere is this more apparent than within social networks like Instagram and on the resale platforms that mimic them. In a recent blog post, Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra hailed ‘social commerce’ as the way of the future, citing community building as the key to driving engagement, building trust, and selling goods online.⁹ To Chandra, influencer markets are essential to selling clothes, and the best way to tap into them is by making shopping networks feel more like social media. But beyond likes, shares and friendly copy inspiring users to ‘join the community,’ social commerce isn’t really all that social.

Instead, shopping platforms mimic social media in other ways. On Depop, sellers are offered a handbook of tips to help them set up their own ‘bedroom empire,’ what amounts to a brightly coloured pitch deck that might also be used to explain how to get popular on Instagram.¹⁰ According to the handbook, the best way to make money is by taking ‘model shots’ — well-lit, full-body photos that show the item you are trying to sell styled into a look. But for sellers, listing items on Depop involves more than doing your makeup and setting up a selfie timer. Like an aspiring influencer you need to create a brand identity, grow your followers, and stay up-to-date with the latest trends — immaterial forms of work or ‘glamour labour’ that may seem stressful but for many, are actually fun.

‘The time I spend on the app is definitely worth it,’ one Depop seller told me on Reddit. ‘Every time I’m active it’s an opportunity to make money for myself doing what I enjoy.’

Virtual shopping can be social, though not necessarily in the way platform developers intended. Endless messaging boards and Instagram accounts dedicated to weird eBay finds and vintage collections act as alternative malls, offering thrifters new ways to share their hauls with larger audiences, sometimes without even shopping at all. For example, Instagram user Vivian Xe shares her watchlisted eBay items to a dedicated account called @lucky_jewel_iwanttt.¹¹ Followers heart matching Miu Miu cowhide sets and third eye prosthetics, commenting their praise under pictures of vintage platforms or asking for links so they can buy them for themselves. ‘It’s like blurring the line between physically consuming something and just having it in some entangled web on the internet,’ Xe told me over the phone. ‘I’m getting rid of the potential energy that I’m holding.’¹²

Almost everyone I spoke to while researching this essay had some kind of relationship to virtual shopping. Like me, many of my friends confessed that scrolling through eBay or Amazon was for them a soothing distraction. But unlike the shameful confession of someone whose Instagram screen time exceeds two hours a day, my shopping-addicted peers seem to take pride in their practice, as if sourcing cheap Giorgio Armani is in itself an artform. I can’t help but agree. Surely snooping through a random Las Vegas stripper’s simulated closet on Poshmark is a better use of time than scrolling through pictures of skinny girls wearing I.AM.GIA on Instagram. Especially if you’re not buying anything.

In an era where trends proliferate faster than the seasonal shows that once spawned them, recommerce apps have the power to both dictate trend cycles and undermine them too. When fangirls buying out used Saddlebags leads to their re-issue at Dior, it’s easy to see how secondary markets can manipulate the fashion industry. But what happens when shoppers sit out trends altogether? If buyers can get gratification from simply browsing online, there’s no need to splurge on conspicuous consumption goods. If you keep that Balenciaga City bag in your RealReal wishlist for long enough, you might forget why you even wanted it, especially if you couldn’t really afford it in the first place.

Like giving up fast fashion, opting out of IRL shopping can feel like a radical act, but Janice Denegri-Knott, the co-author of Digital Virtual Consumption as Transformative Space, isn’t so sure. If collecting designer clothing in digital baskets contributes to a sense of ownership that causes one to abandon online shopping altogether, she tells me, virtual consumption could be considered radical. ‘But because our attention is the ultimate commodity in the digital economy, escaping market forces altogether is unlikely.’¹³

Like the streets of Paris at the turn of the century, resale applications are constructed to capture our attention and maximise the time we spend shopping. Auctions, push notifications, and emails announcing price drops get users to open their apps while explore pages and likes encourage them to stay and play. But in the age of big data, it’s not only our dollars that corporations are after. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshanna Zubkoff argues that it’s not goods, but people and the data they generate that are the most valuable resources online.¹⁴ Not only can platforms use our data to sell ads to corporations, but they can also use it to modify our behaviour IRL.

If that’s the case, it’s no wonder that apps like Poshmark and eBay promote the virtual consumption and collection of goods. The more time we spend online, the more apps know about how and what we consume. For example, if you make a purchase in the early evening on a Wednesday night, the next time you’re feeling tired and stressed at the end of a work day, you might find an email in your inbox announcing a discount on an item you previously liked. These small modes of behaviour modification might seem trivial, but when we take into account all the ways in which our actions are tracked throughout the day, like at the coffee shop when you use your debit card, or when the Instagram app overhears you saying you need new underwear, the opportunities for targeting become unlimited, increasing the pressures to buy.

But virtual consumption has its benefits, too. For example, ‘If we see consumption as enabling us to achieve goals that are important to us, searching for collectables on eBay shouldn’t be seen as detrimental,’ says Denegri-Knott. ‘Collecting may be something that we enjoy with our loved ones, or be an activity that allows us develop skills and knowledge.’¹⁵

Those that hit the ‘buy now’ button produce value too. Real people make real money selling on apps like Poshmark and eBay, and buying used clothes frees woke consumers from the guilt of buying new. What’s more, alternative economies have emerged from ‘sharing’ platforms. On Depop, users have found innovative ways to trade items with those who have similar tastes, while virtual communities like @lucky_jewel_i_wanttt have turned into pop ups IRL. And while extensive packaging and air shipping might not scream sustainability, the growth of resale platforms has made buying used the norm for a whole new generation of people who thought thrifting was just for hipsters. ‘I was that weirdo whose parents couldn’t afford to buy trendy name-brand stuff,’ one Depop user told me on Reddit. ‘To have people buy and wear my thrift selections and handmade pieces is very validating, like… I knew I had good taste!’

For those who can manage to save up enough money for a pair of Yeezys from Goat.com, the question then becomes whether or not buying them is worth it. In the 2018 essay Kinky Labour Supply and the Attention Tax, Venmo co-founder Andrew Kortina and designer Namrata Patel speculate that for young men in America, buying conspicuous consumption goods isn’t worth the trade-off.¹⁶ Most people shop to show off their goods online, and while it’s easier to find like-minded people on the internet, like in the case of Vivian Xe, standing out among the noise is harder than ever. Instead of working more to buy expensive goods, Kortina and Patel argue, young men are more likely to spend time consuming the content available to them for free online. Put simply, unless you’re already rich and famous, the amount of likes you get for posting a photo in a ‘GUCCY’ sweater isn’t worth the cost. Investing in a new Fortnite skin is a better payoff.

Of course, not everyone is keen on making avatars and scrolling through eBay. For those with IRL jobs, how we dress is often as important as our physical and mental abilities, especially for women. Still, it’s not hard to imagine a future wherein our daily lives are lived in uniform and our consumer identities are fulfilled online. Social media already allow us to create fantasy worlds where we can post pictures of places we never went, photoshop our waists to be smaller, and even pretend to be someone else altogether, so why not do the same with clothes?

Whether or not we will consume digital goods in the future isn’t really up for debate, but just how we’ll pay for the use of these objects is yet to be seen. It’s easy to envision a future dominated by monopolistic platforms that keep us confined to algorithmic content tunnels, but we can also consider a less sinister one wherein people can exchange their data in fair, transparent ways for the use of online goods and services. This might include subscription networks or blockchain-based tokens that can be used to represent virtual garments or artworks that can grow in value and scarcity over time. Whatever the method, the future is virtual, and if people want to create new realities as a means to escape the mundanity of their real life ones, so be it. After all, fashion is a creative endeavour and if we want to express it online, we should be able to, especially when everything else feels like it’s outside of our control.

Taylore Scarabelli is a New York-based writer whose work focuses on fashion, feminism and technology. She is fond of Ed Hardy and fist-size hoops.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Capital, available for purchase here.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorihil/2018/01/26/do-you-have-a-hidden-side-hustle-in-your-closet/#37049f591c34 ↩

2. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/why-fashion-loves-the-margiela-tabi-boot ↩

3. R W. Belk and R Llamas, The Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013, p.230. ↩

4. Email interview with Janice Denegri-Knott ↩

5. R W. Belk and R Llamas, The Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013, p.225. ↩

6. F Trentmann, The Empire of Things. New York, NY: Harper, 2016 ↩

7. Ibid. p.455. ↩

8. E Wissinger. ‘#NoFilter: Models, Glamour Labor, and the Age of the Blink,’ Theorizing the Web, Vol 1, Issue 1: 2014 ↩

9. https://blog.poshmark.com/2019/01/31/a-year-in-social-commerce-a-report-by-poshmark/ ↩

10. https://sellers.depop.com/Seller_Handbook_Final_US.pdf ↩

11. https://www.instagram.com/lucky_jewel_iwanttt/ ↩

12. Phone interview with Vivian Xe ↩

13. Email interview with Janice Denegri Knott ↩

14. S Zubkoff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2019 ↩

15. Email interview with Janice Denegri-Knott ↩

16. https://kortina.nyc/essays/kinky-labor-supply-and-the-attention-tax/ ↩

It’s the same narrative typically generated by fashion collaborations: Can you believe X is working with Y? we ask, re: Juicy Couture and Vetements, Christopher Kane and Crocs, Gosha Rubchinskiy and Kangol. In 2017, the collaboration has become as common as the collection. It generates unfailing press, both critical and laudatory. In both scenarios, interest tends to hinge on the brands’ differences, on the inherent edginess of uniting them. In the case of Louis Vuitton and Supreme, the story is that the former brings to the table old-world prestige (and high prices), the latter irreverent youthfulness (and fans rabid enough to pay them).

Yet it’s worth asking: how different are Supreme and Louis Vuitton, actually? They are worn by the same celebrities.³ They are sold in the same shops.⁴ And they both communicate primarily through logos, reinforcing the notion pervasive of late that brands, even more than craft and design, create objects of desire.

Looks-wise, Louis Vuitton x Supreme is a copy-paste. Wallets, duffels and backpacks are virtually unchanged from their, in some cases, decades-old silhouettes; they’re spottable thanks to the word Supreme in limb-size font. Other pieces – skate decks, denim jackets, trunks – stamp the skate company’s logo atop the Louis Vuitton monogram, with the artistry of a teenager pasting an unrequested bumper sticker on his mum’s BMW. When Supreme knocked off Louis Vuitton in 2000, the results were more complex than this: those skate decks tweaked the century-old monogram, swapping out the LV for a dollar sign. Now, the two logos keep safe distance. If the old decks deconstructed logos, the new ones reinforce their sanctity.

The original decks didn’t make much money: two weeks after they were issued, Louis Vuitton sued Supreme,⁵ and unsold inventory was supposedly incinerated.⁶ This bit of streetwear lore fuels the narrative that there’s something subversive and daring about the new collection, too. The collection is ‘not dissimilar to that 17-year-old bootleg,’ writes Vogue.⁷ The denim looks ‘like something you might find on Canal Street rather than Bond Street,’ notes Dazed.⁸ Kim Jones, Louis Vuitton’s designer, encouraged the comparisons. ‘It’s tongue-in-cheek, a bit Dapper Dan, you know? That’s what things are now,’ he told the publication.

Dapper Dan is the Harlem tailor who, in the 1980s, turned bootlegging into an artform, creating custom outfits for rappers and sports stars and eventually getting sued by the luxury brands his designs were besting. When it was founded in 1994, Supreme had more in common with Dapper Dan than Louis Vuitton. Its red box logo was an appropriation of an artist, Barbara Kruger, who herself worked with found images from advertisements. Throughout the Nineties it was known for its irreverent ‘logo bites,’ placing stickers across Calvin Klein ads of Kate Moss, selling T-shirts that aped the branding of Patagonia and Courrèges.⁹ As Supreme grew, these were replaced by official collaborations with Vans, Nike, the Muppets, Playboy. The company began to sue others for copyright infringement, as it had once been sued.¹⁰ Its logo – created as a commentary on logos, worn as an emblem of a wry attitude towards corporate fashion – now served the ur-logo’s original design function, pioneered by Louis Vuitton in 1896: to mark authenticity and protect against intellectual property violations.¹¹

This use of the logo makes sense when you consider how much money is at stake. Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy’s annual revenue in 2015 was €35.7 billion.¹² Supreme is a privately held company, whose earnings are not subject to public disclosure law, but it has ten stores in five countries and fans willing to wait in line every single week when new products drop. The collaboration is priced accordingly: cell-phone cases are reportedly retailing for between €200 and €300, backpacks and bags between €1500 and €3000, trunks for $68,500.¹³

Dapper Dan closed his shop in the 1990s. Though many of the brands he knocked off now reference him, none have invited him to do an official partnership, he told me when we met a few years ago in New York. In one sense, this is surprising: It was Dap, after all, who invented new techniques for working with leather and fur, who created couture-like pieces that rivalled the craft of Louis Vuitton’s own artisans.¹⁴ But it’s Supreme who has most in common ideologically with the luxury brand. Its logo projects status and power. By wearing it, you align not with a person, but with an abstract and impersonal entity. It is, by definition, corporate.

Fifteen years ago, fashion collaborations followed a formula: high-end designer trades cache for cash with a mass-market retailer.¹⁵ Today, they come in all shapes: lateral (Canada Goose and Levi’s), cross-industry (Moschino and Barbie), mainstream-underground (Converse and Comme des Garçons). Often, these garments are mashups, refreshing brand aesthetics through the juxtapositions of familiar silhouettes, patterns, materials. In an era of increasingly ephemeral trends, where brands of all price points churn out hundreds of garments a year and where creative exhaustion is rampant, it’s perhaps unsurprising that designers are eager to find a kind of cheat code, a quick and easy hack for attention.

It’s also perhaps no surprise that, as the collaborations pile up, some of the buzziest versions take a meta-stance, commenting on the phenomenon while benefitting from it. Vetements, for instance, took the collaboration concept to its logical extreme, with a Spring 2017 line consisting solely of co-branded items with companies like Juicy Couture, Hanes and Dr. Martens. Shown in a department store during couture week, emphasising business instead of craft, the pieces felt like anti-couture – a clever in-joke. Similarly, Louis Vuitton x Supreme draws on the latter’s lingering anti-establishment aura, its legacy of satirising precisely the kind of consumer branding this collaboration typifies, to make appealing bags that might otherwise be seen as the luxury versions of totes from a well-sponsored conference.

In many ways, it’s an old story. Fashion has always preferred its capital and wealth obsession with a side of radical chic. But perhaps there’s something contemporary about the collection, too. In the world outside fashion, corporate power is at a heights never seen before, infiltrating art, media and politics. In November, the U.S. elected its first brand as president. His logo is his name, and it’s been used for decades to make money through reality TV shows, real estate projects, and licensing deals. Like Louis Vuitton x Supreme, Donald Trump x America is a collaboration which serves up corporate power with a side of outsider populism. And, like Supreme x Louis Vuitton, it promises to generate lots of money, at least for some.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York City.

1. http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/01/24/supreme-louis-vuitton-reactions ↩

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/fashion/mens-style/louis-vuitton-supreme-collaboration-fall-2017-menswear.html ↩

3. 2 Chainz; Odell Beckham Jr.; Kylie Jenner ↩

4. Dover Street Market ↩

5. http://www.supremenewyork.com/random/decks ↩

6. http://www.crfashionbook.com/text/louis-vuitton-supreme-2/ ↩

7. http://www.vogue.com/article/kate-moss-david-beckham-louis-vuitton-supreme ↩

8. http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/34407/1/why-lv-x-supreme-is-a-watershed-moment-for-fashion ↩

9. See: http://www.imgrum.net/media/1292882430637713806_1647796372 and https://www.reddit.com/r/supremeclothing/comments/2nm9oe/info_on_patagonia_supreme_box_logo ↩

10. ‘She’s trying to build her whole brand by piggybacking off Supreme,’ Supreme’s founder, James Jebbia, told New York Magazine, of Leah McSweeney, whose women’s skate line made goods printed with the phrase ‘Supreme Bitch.’ The logo, McSweeney said in court documents, was meant to ‘parody and comment critically upon the Plaintiff’s use of the term SUPREME in connection with its misogynistic and highly demeaning “boy’s club” attitude and line of skateboard street wear.’ See: http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/supreme-2013-5/ and http://www.complex.com/style/2013/05/supreme-court-the-12-greatest-moments-of-supremes-legal-battle-with-leah-mcsweeney/105 ↩

11. S Bonvicini, Louis Vuitton: Une saga française, Fayard, 2004. In 1895, the luggage company’s original ‘Damier’ checkerboard pattern was copied. The next year, Georges Vuitton, the son of the house’s founder Louis, designed a more complex monogram – the one still in use today – in order to ‘dissuade’ imitators. ‘Ironically, it would become the most copied design in the world a century later,’ writes Bonvicini. [my translation] ↩

12. https://www.lvmh.com/news-documents/press-releases/excellent-performance-of-lvmh-in-2015/  ↩

13. See: https://www.instagram.com/p/BPcxeOTA1_Z/ and http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/01/25/supreme-louis-vuitton-prices/ ↩

14. Dapper Dan is interviewed in Vestoj’s On Masculinities issue. He was also a storyteller at Vestoj‘s Storytelling Salon at MoMA PS1 in 2015. His story can be viewed here, at minute 34:20. ↩

15. Isaac Mizrahi for Target in 2003; Karl Lagerfeld for H&M in 2004. ↩