By Tia Rawlings
Forget eBay, Amazon, and online shopping, Vinted and Depop are making fashion sustainable for the future.
Depop is the fashion marketplace app where the next generation comes to discover unique items, with the motto: “Buy, Sell and Discover Fashion”. With a global community buying, selling, and connecting, it is doing its part to make fashion more inclusive, diverse, and less wasteful.
Vinted (“Don’t Wear It? Sell It!”) is similar as it promotes a second-hand fashion community of more than 45 million members; giving pre-loved fashion a second life and enabling people to make money selling items they no longer need. While eBay sells loads of pre-loved goods, it is also the marketplace for new items.
This is what transforming fashion looks like.
Depop’s numbers rising
Depop is perhaps the most popular today of all the used-clothing apps, especially amongst young people. It had eight million sellers in 2018 – that number rose to more than 30 million at the end of last year.
Shannon Monaghan, 20, BA Fashion student at London Met, Algate, said: ‘I buy all my clothes in charity shops or on Depop. They just have the best stuff, particularly pieces that were released some time ago and are no longer sold in stores, those are the best items.
“And it’s much better for the environment, which is a bonus.”
Making hard cash
Many users of Depop and Vinted find that it is a convenient way to make some extra money, and with a good eye they can profit from items they found at a low price in a charity shop, market, or car boot sale. Sometimes, they are unaware that what they find on the cheap might be worth hundreds.
Wendy Sloane, a lecturer at London Met, managed to get hold of a brown North Face puffer at a car boot sale for £5. “I didn’t realise that the colour was considered vintage and incredibly rare,” she said. “A few years later my daughter sold it for £400.” The jacket was brown with a bright yellow lining, which evidently is highly sought after. Sloane got £50 as a “finder’s reward” from her daughter.
Car boots will never go out of style, as many people understandably prefer to try on clothes before they buy to ensure they fit comfortably, and turn their backs on online shopping. Trying on used clothes in a charity shop or alternatively using rental sites such as HURR for easy returns and cost effective outfits that you only want to wear as a one off solves the problem.
Slow fashion best
Fast fashion is popular amongst thousands of popular high-street brands as well as high-end brands but platforms such as Depop and Vinted are thinking of the environmental impact pushing brands to become more sustainable.
The fashion industry is currently responsible for more annual carbon emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. If the industry maintains its course, an increase of 50% in greenhouse gas emissions is expected within a decade, according to a Princeton study.
However, some people are hesitant about pre-owned clothing. Carolina Pedrajas-Botella, 23, third-year BA Journalism student at London Metropolitan University, said: “I never wear vintage clothes because my mum said if someone died in those clothes how would you feel.
“I used to wear vintage clothes but now I can’t get that out of my head.”
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