skinted and vinted

a cheap cry for help

There’s this website for offloading your old clothes for cheap. It’s called Vinted. If you don’t know it, you’re welcome. Also: apologies in advance. Read on, you’ll soon understand why.

It’s miraculous, Vinted. Terrifyingly easy. You just post a few pics, press a few buttons, accept an offer then print out a label and pop it in the post and collect the hard cash. Like every miraculous game-changer on the internet Vinted is genius and madness, chaos and order, a high-efficiency time-suck that will solve all your problems by creating a bunch more.

The first thing you learn is that, priced properly, everything flies. I’ve read economics so I obviously knew this but I didn’t actually know know it, if you know what I mean? And the cut-throat reality of the used-fast-fashion free-market at critical digital mass is both dazzling and terrifying to behold. On Vinted, you can sell anything, not just the unworn frivolities you bought back in the naughties as a label-whore fashion reporter with pret a porter discounts and more salary than sense, but your H&M leggings, cheap Zara crop tops, discontinued spring 2012 Top Shop (RIP) maternity line. You can literally just drag all junk from the back of your closet, wave the wand and watch you bank balance rise.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? And it is — to a point. The problem is that it’s insanely addictive. So fast-paced, remunerative and sticky, you just can’t look away. It’s like the eco-anarcho-capitalist answer to globalisation, an Orwellian dystopia outfitted by Tom Ford in kitten heels, an opiate and panacea for your guilt-ridden minimalist-consumer soul. Since going on it a week ago, I’ve decided at varying moments, that Vinted is the solution to climate change, a fix for the debt crisis, the end of the High Street, the path to enlightenment and the end of the world. I’ve had these epiphanies while knowing deep down it’s just another sophisticated dopamine-delivery-system designed to replace my nagging desire to have meaningful work and relationships with a desire to be on it and searching for stuff I don’t actually want, let alone need. Except for money, of course.

But you’ll love it, I promise. You’ll hate it too, obviously. Don’t blame me, I didn’t invent it. It’s the minimalist/shopaholic Substack for ageing clothes horses. They’re not paying me to tell you all this, I swear.

My grandmother’s beaver coat just went so I’m loaded again, whoop! I’m filthy and rolling… except ooooh would you look at those zebra-print Golden Goose trainers at half price, so now I’m broke again and running at a loss.

The vibe is less community-pinboard-flat-white and more Kate-Moss-circa-Pete-Doherty. No small talk or dithering. No complaining, explaining, just liking and offering, accept, decline or fuck off. Refunds and returns are tacitly discouraged (reselling is easier than dickering, that’s how they trick you). If you’re down, you get back up by simply unloading more stuff. It’s a panacea and a mass-psychogenic illness, a modern day virtual souk full of sleepless perimenopausal women and childfree, gender-confused millennials suffering from burn out. All of us haggling over cast offs from our thin days and fat days. What fun.

Okay look, I know I've got a problem but I swear on Phoebe Filo’s jawline I’ll stop the second I find a buyer for this tassled Mui Mui baguette bag so I can up my final offer on those linen Toast culottes. At least it’s not eBay or Gumtree or Facebook or that ghastly WhatsApp group I thought was genius before discovering this site. Those other platforms are for amateur tire-kickers, indecisive housewives, the kind of real people who text in the middle of supper Hey, are you around in ten minutes? Then stand in your kitchen hemming and hawing before going, Hmm, I don’t know, it feels a bit boxy, I’ll need to have a think.

(On Vinted, that shit does not fly.)

Can’t stop, won’t stop — sorry not sorry — the more I sell the more I buy, the more I sell. All losses are gains in disguise. Just as I was typing this some sucker in Leicester broke down and accepted my third lowball offer for her Coco Le Met harness bra (lingerie staple), forcing me to concede my Isabel Marant peasant blouse to that scrounger @frokaholic89 for a song, but hey, the bright side I’m now in touching distance of the fleece-lined luxury French wellies that have been haunting me since I glimpsed them at 3:42 am this morning while sponging antiperspirant stains off a bundle of ‘barely-worn’ Kate Hudson athleisure from 2009.

The whole internet operates on collective delusion and Vinted’s is this: The lull of the level playing field. It’s a virtual classless society in which everyone is skinted and minted, cheap-skate and spendthrift, sellers and buyers both. All meaningful exchanges are conducted by AI. Free money! Free postage! Free entry to a never-ending sample sale where everything fits and nobody starves. There are no sob stories or show-offs, no feelings beyond wanting and lacking. Who doesn’t like a bargain? It’s sapping my sanity and destroying my life. Help.