Once upon a time, buying second-hand clothes meant diving – almost archaeologically – into crowded racks, with the promise of finding a unique piece, steeped in history, style and cultural subtext. Today, this practice has been absorbed and reconfigured by the aesthetics of the immediate. The concept of the ‘haul’, once associated exclusively with the mass purchases of Shein or Zara, has penetrated the universe of resale and vintage fashion in a disturbingly effective way.
Tanya Ravichandran, creative director and fashion collector, puts it bluntly: ‘The RealReal and haul should not be in the same sentence’. And yet they are. Resale, once a bastion of conscious, alternative fashion, is now part of the same dopamine and visual compulsion circuit that feeds the fast fashion ecosystem. On platforms such as TikTok, where the hashtags #haul and #vintagehaul accumulate millions of views, second-hand clothing has been repackaged not just as consumption, but as content.
The digital mutation of vintage
At the heart of this new ritual is a structural contradiction: what is promoted as sustainable is consumed with the same breakneck speed as disposable fashion. In this new narrative of digitised resale, the process of personal and intuitive selection has been replaced by frenetic scrolling, powered by interfaces designed to capture attention. Filtering by designer, decade, size and sale has transformed The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, Depop or eBay into addictive platforms, where the experience of finding is gamified and aestheticised.
What used to be textile archaeology is now more like algorithmic hunting. It no longer matters so much what you wear, but how you acquired it: ‘It’s vintage’ is no longer a simple statement of provenance, but a sign of aesthetic belonging, of coded coolness. As consultant Lizzie Wheeler, creator of the popular Shit U Should Buy profile, points out, ‘you can now fill your cart with one-of-a-kind pieces and pay for one shipment, which facilitates mass shipping’. Vintage shopping, in essence, has become a game of speed and visibility.
The haul as a symbolic gesture
The act of ‘hauling’ has been aestheticised to the extreme: opening packages in front of a camera, displaying 90s labels, unfurling Jean Paul Gaultier skirts or Margiela jackets as if they were tarot cards. The haul ceases to be meaningless accumulation and becomes a performance: a carefully orchestrated narrative to gain followers, admiration and cultural validation. Vintage fashion is, in this context, the new aesthetic currency.
Sustainable fashion advocate Jazmine Brown describes it as a ‘visual drug akin to fast fashion’. A micro-dose of dopamine encapsulated in every TikTok clip, every Instagram post, every newsletter of vintage offers. What used to be curation is now circulation. And that circulation, although less polluting in its origin, is still anchored in a logic of accelerated consumption.
A market that is growing, but also emptying
The second-hand market is booming. In 2024, The RealReal added more than 433,000 new buyers, and ThredUP reports that 88% of second-hand clothing spending happens exclusively online. But this meteoric growth does not come without uncomfortable questions: what is lost when vintage becomes trendy? What happens when slow fashion is accelerated by algorithmic demands?
Resale, in its purest form, should be a space of exploration, of connection with the past, of silent resistance against the ephemeral. But today it is also the scene of extractive practices. ‘It is incredibly privileged to walk into a second-hand shop and loot it,’ Ravichandran says. That statement alludes not only to purchasing power, but to the way in which the cultural significance of certain garments is displaced: from archive to spectacle.
Vintage pieces, now highly codified as objects of desire, are seen as cultural capital. It’s not just about having the right dress, it’s about knowing how to tell the story. Knowing how to post it.
The paradox of visible sustainability
By adopting the same mechanisms as fast fashion – urgency, constant novelty, discount codes, gamification – many resale platforms are caught in a paradox: they offer a sustainable alternative, but from an unsustainable logic. Sustainable fashion, as Brown stresses, is not just a question of what you buy, but why and how you buy it.
Sustainability is, above all, a mindset. A gesture of pause, of intention, of connection with the history of each garment. When you buy vintage to capitalise on the aesthetics of exclusivity without this reflection, the original meaning of the act is distorted. The garment ceases to be an extension of values and becomes a simple tool for digital differentiation.
The urgency to slow down
We need to rethink the speed at which we are consuming even what we consider ‘good’. The rise of digital resale may be a boon to keep garments in circulation and avoid their end up in landfills, but if it is based on the same logic of accumulation and visibility, the difference is only superficial.
‘Vintage needs to be policed,’ concludes Ravichandran. Not as a form of elitism or exclusion, but as a call for cultural and ecological responsibility. Not all pieces should be in continuous rotation. Some should be understood, archived, preserved.
Vintage fashion, when approached with respect, can be a path to more conscious dressing. But when it becomes a haul, a content, a career, it loses its essence. If you are going to buy a piece, ask yourself: what does it represent to you, are you willing to care for it, to give it a life, or do you just want to say it’s vintage?
In an age of hyperlinks, algorithms and performative validation, second-hand fashion is at risk of becoming a new form of oblivion disguised as nostalgia. Because not everything old is automatically valuable.
Depop and Vinted’s Gen-Z sellers are uploading clothes from ten years ago, labelling them ‘vintage’ at exorbitant prices.
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