Why are Vinted and eBay showing at Fashion Week?

This Fashion Week, eBay and Vinted brought circular fashion to New York and London with actual second-hand clothing runway shows. It is not the first time an online resale platform has connected with the world of pop culture: since 2022, eBay launched a collaboration with the British reality show Love Island to dress the participants, replacing the previous sponsors (which were linked to fast fashion). This season, the American vintage and second-hand resale platform created Endless Runway, a fashion show live-streamed in collaboration with the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the British Fashion Council, featuring only used clothing. It launched this week in New York and will soon be in London. During London’s Fashion Week, Oxfam’s show will return to the runway, supported for the first time in five years by Vinted. It is indeed a favorable moment for online resale platforms: even Vestiaire Collective, which focuses more on luxury compared to Vinted and eBay, has made a special appearance this year in one of the new episodes of Netflix's Emily in Paris, a collaboration aimed at expanding the platform's audience, thanks to the show’s vast following. But will all these initiatives really have the right impact to promote second-hand fashion to larger audiences?

While luxury fashion faces a challenging period, it’s the fast fashion sector that is emerging in the climb to power - both economically and artistically. In a clear attempt to reposition itself, Zara is collaborating with literary institutions such as Éditions Gallimard and established creatives like Stefano Pilati, while H&M has designed a capsule with CharliXCX to ride the pop wave of Brat, the album of the summer. Meanwhile, Shein is preparing for an IPO in London. In a landscape where the balance between luxury and accessible fashion has clearly shifted, second-hand fashion finds itself forced to step in and play the same game as the fast fashion giants, amid pop culture and social events during Fashion Week. Of course, it does so in its own style, collaborating with Netflix series and showcasing runway shows that prioritize sustainability; in any case, the initiatives carried out by eBay and Vinted during the latest Fashion Weeks demonstrate how determined these companies are to stay in the game.

2025 is shaping up to be a great year for sustainable fashion: the second-hand sector is showing growth three times higher than the global apparel market, with Vinted reaching for the first time a 61% increase in sales. TikTok, the social media favorite of the younger (and therefore less affluent) consumer base, is also promoting in-app purchases of luxury vintage items, turning away for a moment from Shein shopping hauls, while Vestiaire Collective is striving to completely eliminate fast fashion brands from its pages. In short, the battle between accessible fashion and sustainable fashion is a fierce one, with luxury, which finds itself having to side with vintage, inevitably lagging behind. As we await to see eBay and Oxfam’s runway shows in collaboration with Vinted at London Fashion Week, all that’s left is to applaud the efforts of second-hand platforms to restore order in an increasingly fast and polluting fashion world.