AUGUSTSEPTEMBER,THECUT 55Now 140,000 items per day are listed on Depop,
which takes a 10 percent commission from each
sale. At $30, the average sale is arm’s-reach low, and
most transactions are for a single item. Attainable
prices make Depop especially appealing to younger
crowds, though the costs are never so low that
they’re beyond haggling. “Young kids that are
spending their last pennies” is how Ebony Ugo, 37,
a fashion stylist and single mom in New Jersey,
describes many of her customers. Complaints per-
colate on forums like Reddit and Instagram, where an account
featuring screen grabs of absurdities from Depop DMs has over
90,000 followers. “Hiya lovely! Love this skirt,” goes one. “Would
you take 14p? X.” Fourteen pence, at the current rate of conver-
sion, is 17 cents.
Seasoned sellers offer bundles, which can be several items
packaged together for a slightly discounted rate or custom-made
selections based on customer requests. Internet Girl’s bundles
are some of Depop’s hottest commodities, part of her “interna-
tional styling service.” She offers 20 per week, $150 each, every
Sunday at 2 p.m.; by 2:10, they are
gone. Users supply a theme, which
might be “Y2K skater girl” or “indus-
trial rave princess.” “Some people
totally contradict themselves,” she
says. “But I still manage to pull it
together.” Internet Girl, like several
top Depop merchants, has been so
successful selling vintage that she
has branched off into creating a jew-
elry line of her own, items from
which frequently appear in her
bundles. Like her idol, Luella too
sells jewelry pieces of her own design, though hers are handmade
necklaces with beads from Michaels.
Depop’s innovation is to understand the alchemy of the
“peer” in peer-to-peer transactions, relieving 30-
and 40-year-old fashion directors and the gray-
ing CEOs of publicly traded multinational
apparel companies of their duty to preach cool-
for-a-price to young customers. The youth can
minister to themselves.
The usual adolescent school dramas apply. “A
lot of my friends will look through older kids’
reviews or likes,” explains Julia, 14, who says
most of her friends at her New York City school
use Depop. Instead of buying what the popular
girl wears to school, now you can literally shop
her closet—or undercut her before she even has
a chance to wear it herself. “I’ve seen people wear the stuff
that I’ve liked before on random accounts. Like, oh, wow.”
Julia’s friend Lindsay knew of at least one serious spat that
had begun as a result of Depop snakiness.
Julia now sells on Depop and buys on Depop, and the money
she makes on Depop often goes back into Depop, with the plat-
form making a commission on each sale. Small price to pay for
an app that, she says, completely changed her style. “If you lookat pictures a year ago and now,” Julia says, “I used
to be a little basic and dress like other people.
Now I only ever wear thrifted clothes.”NoahCarlosis,intheirownestimation,“kind of
an OG.” (Noah identifies as nonbinary and uses
they/them pronouns.) Noah, who lives in Orange
County, joined Depop a few years ago around the
age of 15. “When I started, there weren’t too many
sellers,” they say. “Compared to now, when it seems
like everybody and their mother’s on the app.”
Noah runs Loser Thrift, a Depop page of thrift finds: second-
hand Hanna Andersson baby-doll dresses, floral stretch tops from
the ’90s, an old Delia*s T-shirt. “My buyers are young, impression-
able teenagers that want to dress different,”
they say, with the wisdom that comes from
being almost 19. The look that Noah finds
performs best at the moment is the one
Depop is synonymous with: ’90s and early-
aughts vintage that’s searchable and tagga-
ble throughout the platform as “Y2K.”
“Right now, it’s the 2000s,” Noah says.
“Everybody’s living for a Bratz moment.”
(The Bratz dolls arrived in 2001 as the fash-
ion-obsessed, bad-attitude antidote to Bar-
bie’s ageless primness.) For $45, Noah can
offer you an extra-large children’s jacket
printed with foil butterflies. “Early 2000s Old Navy is everything,”
their description reads. “super lizzie mcguire .” In the year
2000, Noah was in utero.
Gazing out from their Depop grid, Noah is lanky and sloe-
eyed, with the kind of unattainable dreamy vagueness that is a
model’s stock-in-trade. They have recently found extra-app
celebrity as a runway and print model, appearing in ads for
Helmut Lang, couture for Schiaparelli, and editorials inInter-
viewand ItalianVogue.
Traveling as a model has taken a bite out of
Noah’s free time to Depop, but lately, they say,
they’ve spent at least three hours every day orga-
nizing, shooting, and describing. Their look is var-
ied and indefinable in the usual Depop way: a mix
of eras, styles, labels, and fits, some of which
bedevil all but the fashionable 18-year-old imagi-
nation. (“Y2K does ’70s is still a thing,” they say
authoritatively.) “A lot of designers get inspiration
from what I wear,” says Noah, who has also mod-
eled for Marni, Missoni, and Margiela. “Low-key,
I don’t want to see it on the runway, because I
want to be the only one with this kind of dress on.”
“Literally, ugly is cool on Depop,” Luella says. “Grandpa, big,
Nike. Literally old people’s shoes are cool on Depop. I mean,
they’re cool now not only on Depop. Depop is making these
things cool.”“If you would’ve told me when I started Depop it would have
turned into what it is now, I would not have believed you,” says
Jlynn Norvell, who lives on what can@internetgirl$ 35@singulier@getridofita11$ 58@masha_jlynn$ 100t the popular girl wears, you can shop her closet—or undercut her.
$ 44(Continued on page 82)