I’m lying on my stomach outside my daughter’s room, so beaten down by a two-hour bedtime that my chin is on the carpet. As the last of my night drains away, I need something to fill the hole at my centre, so I tilt my face up just enough to see the Vinted app on my phone, and think of the one thing that would get me out of here. Cowboy boots. Yes. I’d forgotten, but I have always really wanted a pair of cowboy boots.
I search through the options on Vinted’s absurdly easy search system. Cowboy boots have a strange fit, and I don’t know what size I am, but this is so, so different from internet shopping: I message two owners for their sole measurements, length and width, and instantly, there and then on a Saturday night, they run off at my command and measure their boots while I lie on the floor. How high are they, I add? “3.5cm”. No, I mean how high up your leg? “Apologies,” says one obediently: “they are 36cm”. I feel the adrenaline, or the dopamine, or whatever it is, rising in my blood. The boots are sixty pounds, but I can get sixty pounds if I sell that wool thing I don’t wear, and the tweed jacket too. I didn’t know I wanted them seven minutes ago, but the thing is, these cowboy boots are FREE.
From the bedroom I hear the familiar snap of a steel tape measure. My partner is selling a coat that turned up six hours ago. The original photos had the flash on, so the coat looked grey but it’s actually blue. It’s fine, he says: he’s already replaced it with another one – now he just needs to sell the blue one, and two others that turned up but didn’t fit. A few seconds later I hear him padding to the living room and picking up a guitar. He hits the strings that he re-tuned to Joni Mitchell’s open tunings one evening after he’d been scrolling for clothes. He says it feels like food for him; it helps to repair the effect of Vinted. I learned four chords myself the other day, after 40 years of just looking at the guitar: I can now suddenly play half of “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor. I’ve also been thinking about going to church – images of altars flash in my mind. Anything to get rid of this empty Vinted hole.
I’ve never had an addiction before: I’m not a gambling woman and I’m not on social media. I sometimes leave my mobile phone at home and go out for an entire day. But Vinted is a powerful and perfect storm, because it combines four distinct highs: the hit of contact, the hit of making money, and of getting a bargain – and the biggest hit of all, the powerful and abstract sense of remaking oneself through clothes. This is at the heart of consumerism – that you can buy the new you – but I think it goes deep, deep into the soul. This feeling around clothes has always remained happily abstract for me. As flawed as it is – for the spiritual wardrobe is never complete – it is aspirational, connected to renewal and transition. Vinted has changed all that: there is no waiting, no saving up, no dreaming, nothing out of reach. It has shown me, with deathly regularity, the way that the talismanic glow around an object falls away, not the moment you receive it – but the moment you have PAID for it, leaving you empty and hungry for more.
Vinted was founded by a Lithuanian closet-clearer called Milda Mitkure in 2008, and in the last year its audience has increased by 50%: there are now 15 million users in the UK. The unquestionably wonderful thing about it is that it stops clothes waste: it is less good for charity shops, though I suppose they’ll still get the really crap bits most people can’t be bothered to sell. It also draws your attention to the vastly inflated prices of high street clothing in a way which feels quietly revolutionary. But I’ve had my first fraud: a man selling knock-off Nordic Socks. And I’ve had the “dead” seller who allowed me to pay for a stained Stutterheim raincoat and never sent it (the money gets refunded automatically: the model is flawless – Ebay is a complete mess by comparison). I feel sorry for the people who own the local corner shop, trampled by a daily parade of idiots like me carrying things wrapped up in black plastic bags, dumping them in a cardboard box and not buying anything. I feel sorry for the roads and the air, jammed with Evri drivers. Like AirBnB, Vinted’s reviews culture is unsustainable: endless glowing five stars, so everyone can keep their ratings up. My one four-star review (for no reason!) upset me so much I wrote to the writer to ask her why. I just checked our conversation in the app: it says “message seen”. Why is she ignoring me?!
When anything gets so big so fast, you sense you’re clinging to the tower of Babel – but perhaps the only real harm Vinted is doing is to our brains. I don’t want to be this person, secretly measuring my foot behind my daughter as she sits and watches TV. I’ll be winding down my account very soon. I’ll be playing more guitar. The thing that makes Vinted so very hard to give up is that I have still spent very little money on it, because every time I see something I want, I sell a bit of my shit to compensate, and there’ll always be more shit. As soon as the boots turn up, and just as soon I’ve sold the tweed jacket to pay for them, then I’m outta here. I swear.
[See also: No one asked for Meta’s “AI chatbot”]
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