Sabrina Carpenter's Birthday Dress Is Fueling a Depop Controversy
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The yellow slip dress that Sabrina Carpenter wore for her 25th birthday was an instant viral fashion moment. Aside from the fact that her stylist Jared Ellner revealed the look was inspired by the full-length silk dress Kate Hudson wears in How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days, a surprising twist was that Carpenter bought the dress on Depop. While secondhand shopping is not a novel idea for most of us, getting the “that’s that me” stamp of approval from someone we just saw on the Met Gala red carpet is a win for vintage enthusiasts. On the other hand, the dress, or rather the store where Ellner bought it from, kicked up discourse about what secondhand fashion actually means for shoppers today.
On social media, some people pointed out that the seller of Carpenter's dress also listed fast fashion items, like Forever21 shorts, for over $200, noting that they are “rare” and “vintage.” Not only is rare the antithesis of fast fashion and patently absurd to claim, the shorts were actually reselling elsewhere for no more than $15. More so, there were other items like Hollister shorts purchased at a low cost but selling for over $90. You get the idea.
First, let's get out of the way the fact that markups are not surprising or new; they are part of the resale business, and for many of these sellers, a Depop storefront is exactly that. You’re paying for their curation, and there are a ton of people shooting their proverbial shot at writing great product copy with the hope that a buyer bites. But is it fair to pay a 2,000% increase on a product that was originally sold for $25? Probably not.
There’s more to this than just overpaying or predatory marketing – it’s the sheer volume of fast fashion that you have to wade through when shopping secondhand these days. Walk into any consignment store or scroll through Depop, ThredUP, and many other secondhand platforms for two minutes, and you’re bound to come across dozens of items from brands like Forever21, Shein, and Zara. Selling those pieces and keeping them in the cycle is better than, say, disposing of them or sending them off to global secondhand markets, but the issue is that the brands have overproduced to the point that we are losing the best parts of smaller scale secondhand shopping. The cheap trend cycle, built on prioritizing consumerism over the planet and the people who make clothing, has contaminated the one thing we could all agree is a great counter to the overwhelmingly fast trend cycles. It’s why some resellers, like Vestiaire Collective, have banned fast fashion from the platform.
Thrift-flipping aside, new pieces are recirculating into the market at an alarmingly fast rate. It’s not just about jacking up prices for people who want to shop for affordable clothing (the ethics of which we will likely debate for a century); it’s that we’ve gone from encouraging resale as a climate solution to having to deal with a whole new problem of drowning in unprecedented quantities of fast fashion, marked up or not.
In the recent past, shopping secondhand meant using your skills to find the most unique pieces and the biggest problem – besides some unsavory stains and smells – was wading through dated clothing that may need a tweak or two. Now, with unregulated fast fashion growth, you have to make sure you’re not being accidentally taken on a piece of clothing that’s not made to last and originally retailed for significantly less. Who wants to work late, er… more for something that's supposed to be fun?
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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