“Do you really wanna be like them? Do you really wanna be another trend?” – Good Charlotte, The Anthem
“Why?” you might ask.
It’s quite simple, really. It’s a market disguised as an Inner West wet dream of trinkets and vintage clothing. But, in reality, Glebe Markets is stallholders up-selling fast fashion pieces that feel like plastic tarp. It is all your ex-housemates and lovers reselling their Glassons purchases from a year ago. It is the stallholder, embarrassed, telling my best friend that she can just “have” that Fortnite shirt, and then charging my other best friend fifty dollars for another. It is vintage ‘curators’ making a living by selling you a 2010s emo tee from Target for an absurd amount of money because the safety pin tag says y2k. Plus there’s only one obscure book stall among the 200 artisan, vintage, second-hand, pre-loved, bought-last-month, copy-paste, ubiquitous, fashion girlie elitism. And… the dumplings are expensive. There, I said it.
The so-called epidemic of vintage shopping broke out post-Covid. Perhaps, if anything, the pandemic had bought us the instantaneous gratification of self-curatorship through the ease of online shopping. The accessibility of individualism, or identity, through cheap and unethically made clothing created ripple effects in our digital images. We could not see one another physically, and therefore, had to display ourselves through a code of certain visual semiotics in order to understand one another. Even the etymology of aestheticism lends itself to this, the Greek word for perception, to perceive things. Therefore, the visual representation of oneself, especially through clothing, became an immediate indicator of personality. And so, post-pandemic, the need to self-curate a code of specific semiotics is still an itch we long to scratch: one that we want to deem more “authentic” — so we op-shop. We op-shop until it becomes a contact sport with the winners loitering somewhere close to an individualism and the losers picking up re-sold, up-marked pieces on Depop or IRL Depop (á la Glebe Markets). It is an etiquette crisis, in which we finger through racks of clothing at speeds unimaginable because picking up something ugly would be a waste of our time. It is as if we do not have the patience for the concept of the op-shop itself: a shop for opportunity. It is a highly reproduced, post-humanist need to consume in order to be an individual.
And yet, op-shopping is a skill deeply buried in our animus from when we were still hunting and gathering. If anything, the skill of curation is pre-human. Think of the magpie, the bowerbird or crow who collects shiny objects to decorate their nests so they know it is theirs. The need to be individual is so innate to us, both as animals and as children of digital aestheticism, that we all raid the same op-shops. We get the same piercings, tattoos, and haircuts in the name of difference. Yet, when we are all trying so hard to be eclectically curated, we all end up looking the same. The price of that y2k penny lane coat is bigger than a dollar sign babe, it is the price of individualism itself. It is a game. Who can be the most outrageously Pinterest on King Street? As if the contents of one’s mind is not decadently curated enough that we must judge upon the sheer common sense of accessorising.
When I turned eighteen, I deleted TikTok.When I was questioned as to why, I said that an app cannot bring me any more inspiration than what I already bring to myself, than what I can already conjure up in my mind. But, I must be honest, I am not an island. I am influenced by small fancies and large. I still peruse Newtown Vinnies on the way home from a yoga class under the guise of “you never know what you might find”. I have had my fair share of Glebe Market purchases: CD’s, boots, monstera plants, vintage slips, and overpriced corsets. I’ve spent way too much on vintage kitten heels that I screamed at my feet to fit. I’ve rummaged through the op-shops in my hometown as if searching desperately for a long-gone lover, only to settle when I’ve found some piece of him: some beaten leather jacket, some polka-dot teapot. Sometimes op-shopping feels Frankensteinian, wherein I am curating something other than myself but still of myself, from the loins of the small-town op-shop where you can still buy a dress for two dollars. When I am dressed head-to-toe in parts of other people, other people I have no way of ever knowing, I feel somehow more myself. An amalgamation of found-objects. An art piece. A tartan jacket,a purple-knit scarf, a baker boy cap, and a pair of hiking boots. A hand from out of the dirt: it’s alive!
