InvestigationEmptying your overloaded dressing room and not adding to the pollution of the textile industry: behind the benefits of recycling platforms also hide mercantile reflexes where your wardrobe becomes capital to grow.
Listening to Rébecca Berlana tell her story on the other end of the line, we sometimes have the feeling of hearing a former crack addict. “It’s like drugs, the brain always wants more!” It makes you happy for a few moments, and then it passes, and you have to start over. confides this fifty-year-old childminder, in the detoxification phase. Despite appearances, the cause of his addiction is not the little white pebble that smokes around Place Stalingrad in Paris, but a website allowing you to sell and buy second-hand clothes from home: Vinted.
Five years ago, when she registered on the platform, Rébecca Berlana was a compulsive consumer of fast fashion in full questioning. While everywhere in her home, even under her bed, clothes and shoe boxes extend their sprawling hold, she sees in this community online market, founded in 2008 in Vilnius by a Lithuanian couple, a way to get rid of “those material possessions which [l]‘choking’. “It had been several years since I turned to ecology in other areas: food, waste management. We made compost with the neighbors. There remained this problem, the most difficult: this addiction to fashion. It was, I believe, a way of filling in the gaps. »
Vinted or garage sales 3.0
With brands such as Videdressing, Vestiaire Collective and, more recently, MooM, Modalist or Once Again, Vinted, which has 19 million members in France (50 million worldwide), has changed the image of second-hand clothes , long associated with the dusty atmosphere of garage sales. Encouraged by the ease of use of digital and under the effect of effective TV advertising campaigns, mentalities are changing: nothing is more chic now than facing the rain in an old, colorful K-Way from the 1980s.
While Rebecca’s shelves are gradually emptying, a euphoric feeling accompanies her first commercial shoots. “I was coming out of a painful professional failure, a collective nursery project that had not worked, and seeing that my wardrobe was popular on Vinted, it gave me a little flame. I resold many models of fast fashion, Zara, H&M, which I had sometimes never worn. To destock quickly, I cut prices. We play the merchant and we are delighted to have made profitable the pieces that we would have given away or put in dumpsters for clothes”, explains this mother of two daughters, who are also fashion fans.
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