Regarding the Depop Tote Bag

by Owen Brandes, Contributor

Let me put my cards on the table. I use Depop. I sell things on Depop from time to time—old t-shirts and pants I don’t wear. I buy things from Depop on occasion—a promo button-up for an old movie, a painter’s hat or something of that sort. What’s so great about techno-capitalism is that it allows anyone to be petit-bourgeoisie, the small independent shopkeeper bravely venturing out across the great sea of commodity circulation. You, too, can seamlessly participate in the awesome process of the exchanging of goods and services, for only a bit of cheddar and a beat-up pair of Dickies Skateboarding chinos, or a Freitag messenger bag, or a faded Hotline TNT shirt, or a pair of Mexico 66s, or a three-tone Kavu strapcap hat, a this, that, and the other thing! A whatnot and what-have-you! A something and something-or-another.

Oh, yes, there is indeed a sensory rush when savaging the USPS-stickered polyethylene webbing, slyly extracting the New Balances cradled carefully within… And when you don your trail-running shoes for dizzying laps around the TIMARA synthesizer studio, you feel as though you’ve just scaled the Holy Mountain, and may dine with the immortal sages on its summit. How is Chanel Beads sounding through those Porta-Pro wired headphones of yours? Has the foam fallen off yet? Don’t even get me started on the jacket trade. I wear my chore coat because I too do chores; because I too labor. I too engage in hard work. I love working. I have to carry my John Berger books (one in each pocket) all the way from the mailroom back to Tank before my crew shift. Ouch! I’m totally beat, I need to put Chanel Beads back on. Let me kick off my 9060s. Actually, I might even be able to get a few minutes of this Adam Friedland episode in before I fall asleep…

Depop retains a pronounced market share for clothing e-commerce, especially among Gen Z. Vinted is growing in popularity but I think its bailiwick is more the childless millennial crowd. And Poshmark certainly doesn’t compare; eBay owns Depop but it just isn’t the same either—I mean, you can buy golf clubs on there! Listen, when the Oberlin student wants to shop secondhand clothes online, Depop is undoubtedly the premier choice. Easy, accessible, a suave interface, bright colors, the works. Of course, it’s all curated specifically for the data-brokered individual user but what’s really revealing is when you start to prowl around the “trending” or “wardrobe essentials” sections. Then we get into the various categories and the “hot” search terms: “Russell Athletic Hoodie,” “waxed jackets,” “Y2K bags,” “raglan shirts,” “Snoopy” (?). Because the key thing about Depop is that it knows its audience. 

There’s our obsession with nostalgia, a time and associated aesthetic identity that seems (erroneously) more hopeful and innocent than the dreadful ones we live in. A sensibility towards taste and distinction—the careful, youthful 2020s navigation between irony and sincerity. We mustn’t forget the cultural bricolaging: some streetwear here, some gorpcore there, an Americana and even cottagecore lurking somewhere close behind. And remember, it’s all secondhand. The endless listings on Depop are posted by people just like you. A consumer-subject that’s completely individuated through the magnificent powers of algorithmic data harvesting, and at the same time looking for and buying the exact same things. It is a particular consumer base, the unique, distinguishing, savvy, “cool” youth, with unique, distinguished, savvy, “cool” taste in clothing. We’re all so unique, distinguished, savvy, and cool!

This is the domain of the Zoomer Hipster Intelligentsia, the ZHI. We all have interesting personalities with interesting affinities to music and books and movies and we all have interesting hobbies and we all are able to signify all of this so easily with our socialized artistic sensibilities and seamless rituals of signification and recognition because we do most of our shopping on Depop and are able to convene with 68 million (according to Depop) articles of cultural and, more importantly, subcultural refuse and detritus circulated by the ZHI that may be easily appropriated by us, the ZHI, the ethical and altogether refined youth, to definitively and courageously declare that we have done it, we have linked the sensory chain together and we have at long last done it—with this acquisition of This Is Lorelei’s promotional The Singer In My Band pack of playing cards we have—finally—done it. 

The ZHI is a class thing. Attending Oberlin College is a class thing and the ZHI is necessarily a class thing, and vice versa. We’re all aware of this. The Review and the Grape have collectively run so many op-eds of various people asking for Oberlin students to check their privilege that whenever I see one I start to twitch and get the sweats. I’m doing basically the exact same thing (sorry) but I do want to clarify something important: It’s totally fine to use Depop, to try and figure out your style and yourself and your self-expression experiment with that and sell things you don’t want and buy things you don’t need. It’s what we’ve been socialized to do. It’s seriously fine. 

But then I saw it. Clear as day, and—blessings!—what a beautiful day it was in Wilder Bowl then. Staring at me, from across the Mudd onramp over by Wilder Main. A bright red tote bag, with that nice, clean, minimalist logo. Depop. Strung over a peer’s shoulder. Clear as day. I briefly stopped my walk to Harkness lunch, lingered for a moment, and then consigned myself to continue onward, letterstoyou blaring in my headphones and the weight of my Chud Durkheim readings in my bag seeming to bear imperceptibly heavier on my shoulders.

So I will hazard another important clarification. There is a difference between participating in the commodity-trade—of fun ones, the ZHI with our clothes and accessories—and participating in the active promotion of the infrastructure of this trade. A marketplace is nothing more than a series of intertwined credits and debts. It is a lowly, ugly thing. Depop has a “college ambassador” program, for advocating circular fashion and “community” (I think this is where the branded tote bags emanate from). Do not be mistaken. There is no “community,” and there will never be a community. There are creditors and debtors. There are those deprived of goods and those who possess them. A relationship between things, between objects, should not be mistaken for relationships between people. Shopping secondhand is a good thing, and a good way for a college student to make some extra money, but it should never be anything more than that. The bottom line is, and always will be, Depop incorporating more users—numbers, data—into their marketplace, more creditors and debtors. Somewhere along the way we have conflated the services this corporation provides with some kind of nebulous, brave and virtuous marker of—what, our passion for facilitating the buying and selling of things? We may all be petit-bourgeois, but let me abundantly clear– we should not be proud of that. We should be very dissatisfied with that. We should be—and are, consciously or subconsciously—a little ashamed, if I’m being honest. 

There were no immortal sages on top of the Holy Mountain. It was just a normal mountain, the whole time. Let’s not lose sight of the journey on the way to the destination. Your Depop tote bag is not self-expressive, or subversive, or exciting. It’s embarrassing. If you really feel the need to advertise a marketplace through your person, get a Trader Joe’s sardine tote like everyone else. You can probably even get one on Depop.