LuellaRocheis16yearsold.She lives in a small town in Ulster
County, hangs out with her friends, and just got her learner’s
permit. Luella doesn’t get an allowance. She doesn’t need one.
She has Depop.
Depop is a sales platform for the secondhand, an impossibly
enormous international flea market in app form. If eBay is a
bazaar and Instagram is a beauty pageant, Depop is both. Just
about anything you can shoot with your iPhone camera you can
sell on Depop, so there’s Polaroid film and skateboards and a
1978 Garfield alarm clock and God knows what else, but mostly
there are secondhand clothes and accessories, a digital thrift
haul exploding out of its users’ literal closets.
Luella is blonde, bubbly, and savvy in the almond-milk-latte
way of the new American teens. “Depop is very happening among
young people,” she says. About six months ago, she downloaded
the app and started browsing. Then she bought a few things—a
couple pairs of mom jeans, some Air Force 1’s—and realized the
things she was buying were not unlike the things she had sitting
around unworn. She’d always thrifted, so she started offering up
the castoffs from the back of her closet. Then she started buying
specifically for the app, during her free time and on weekends
and whenever she can get her mom, the fashion designer Ryan
Roche, to give her a lift. She’ll select cute pieces in any and every
size. In the past few weeks, she has posted a cutoff Disney World
sweatshirt, a clear plastic Lady Gaga backpack, a Juicy Couture
wallet. “This is the CUTEST most perfect pair of Levis vintage
distressed high-waisted shorts,” she wrote recently of a $40 pair.
“They are light wash and make your ass look fire.”EPOP
The app that
has GEN Z hooked on
THRIFTING.
By Matthew Schneier
Photograph by David Williams