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First Love Island, now London Fashion Week: Ebay is developing a penchant for using prime-time pop culture moments as a Trojan horse for pre-loved fashion.
Tonight, the resale platform will stage the second of its twin ‘Endless Runway’ events — live, shoppable secondhand catwalks streamed first from New York and now London, in partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and the British Fashion Council (BFC), respectively.
For Ebay, this is part of a bid to spread awareness of and elevate pre-loved fashion, spearheaded by general manager of global fashion Kirsty Keoghan and pre-loved style director Amy Bannerman, who was appointed last year. This approach is tried and tested: when Ebay replaced the fast fashion sponsors of reality dating show Love Island in 2022, searches for “pre-loved fashion” grew by 1,600 per cent and searches for “sustainable fashion” increased by 7,000 per cent. The common thread, Keoghan says, is pushing secondhand into the mainstream, where it’s impossible to ignore. “Most people are on their phones all the time, and there are multiple things they could be looking at. This is an opportunity for us to grab them and put pre-loved at the forefront of their minds.”
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Like the clothes, the concept isn’t new. Global charity Oxfam has been hosting a secondhand fashion show during London Fashion Week for years, albeit not on the official schedule. This year’s star-studded affair, which is also happening today as part of Oxfam’s broader ‘Secondhand September’ campaign, will be co-hosted with Ebay rival Vinted.
However, it comes at an inflection point for resale, which is becoming evermore visible (notably, luxury resale site Vestiaire Collective was featured in Netflix hit Emily in Paris in August).
Ebay’s runway events are among a series of activations aimed at meeting consumers where they are, in a bid to intercept drivers of overconsumption. Non-profit The Or Foundation took out a billboard in Times Square during New York Fashion Week to highlight the issue of textile waste. Elsewhere, resale technology firm Archive has invited around 20 of its brand partners to take part in Secondhand September this year. Brands including Diane von Furstenberg, Sandro and Ulla Johnson will make pre-loved fashion available in their physical stores throughout the month, while others — such as Oscar de la Renta, The North Face and Christy Dawn — will run discounts and promotions online.
Celebrating archival fashion
Ebay’s event is pegged to the 40th anniversary of London Fashion Week, a perfect chance to look back at designers and collections past, says Bannerman. The collection spans eras and price points, from £24 to £1,000. It’s an intentional mishmash of archival Alexander McQueen and “random men’s pyjama pants”, where Wales Bonner’s football-inspired Adidas collection and a Mulberry Bayswater handbag sit alongside a university sweater and a Cub Scouts blanket adorned with activity badges. “I wanted the collection to look like Ebay. To me, that means buying within a price range, where expensive stuff is styled with super rare and nostalgic stuff,” Bannerman explains. “That’s how everyone I know shops, and it really embodies the diversity of London fashion. Ebay is for everybody — that’s something I’m always keen to push.”
Bannerman and her team sourced some pieces specifically for the show, but others have been in their growing archive for a while, waiting for the right outing. There’s a pair of chaps that were originally purchased for Love Island, a jacquard Burberry coat Bannerman says she “had to buy” when it was listed for £50 last year, and a rare Stella McCartney Smile knit that her neighbour helped clean a coffee stain out of. The pieces will be available to shop on Ebay as they go down the runway, with additional secondhand edits dropping daily after the show ends.
Showing secondhand fashion as something aspirational, in a forum usually reserved for the industry’s upper echelons, is a significant move, says sustainability consultant Francois Souchet. “Pop culture is critical in normalising new behaviours and broadening the reach and appeal of secondhand,” he explains.
But whether this promotes sustainable behaviours depends on how Ebay tempers this growth. “Platforms should be careful about not creating perverse incentives that fuel overconsumption — we often see circular models being used to fuel linear growth,” cautions Souchet. In other words, shopping secondhand can only be considered sustainable when it displaces new purchases and decouples revenue growth from new material use. Otherwise, it’s simply replacing one form of overconsumption with another.
“Forty per cent of Gen Z consumers tell us they want to shop pre-loved,” says Keoghan, noting that Ebay doesn’t track displacement rates, which can be difficult to quantify accurately. “We want to make it much more accessible for people to do that, and shine a light on the huge archive of amazing designer and non-designer pieces listed on Ebay. It’s important for us to bring pre-loved to fashion week so it’s not sidelined and separate. It shows that secondhand and circularity can be more integrated in the brand story.”
Pre-loved and refurbished items currently make up 40 per cent of Ebay’s gross merchandise volume globally, and Souchet says monitoring this over time while trying to grow the percentage of secondhand goods could be a solid indicator for actual environmental impact.
Where it fits into Ebay’s broader goals
Bannerman’s role is to bridge the gap between Ebay and the fashion industry, finding opportunities to elevate the Ebay brand and insert pre-loved fashion into the mainstream. This includes building a showroom for stylists and celebrities to pull from, sourcing for activations like Endless Runway, and working with influencers. When content creator and Substack blogger Lucy Williams posted about her wardrobe being like Carrie Bradshaw’s without the Manolo Blahnik heels, for example, Bannerman reached out and offered to source her a pair.
Eventually, Bannerman would like to see Ebay credited in magazine editorials alongside brands producing new garments, and established brands using Ebay to pull their own archival looks to style alongside current pieces in fashion shows. “My dream is for pre-loved to be normalised in luxury, just like it has been in the fast fashion space,” she says.
As Ebay pushes further into the world of fashion, it is also adapting its platform to better serve consumer needs, says Keoghan. The platform is trying to build trust in the secondhand market and address consumer hesitations, she continues. In 2021, Ebay took on the murky world of luxury authentication, applying its Authenticity Guarantee to trainers, handbags and watches (the programme was extended to fine jewellery in October 2023); Keoghan says the programme has authenticated more than 10 million items to date. In April 2022, the platform launched the Imperfects initiative, to sell new but damaged clothing from over 100 brands, including Off-White and The North Face, at up to 60 per cent off. Then came the partnership with Reskinned, designed to bring more secondhand goods onto the marketplace by gathering stock from branded take-back schemes. And in the US, there is also a consignment programme, where Ebay sells items on behalf of its users, for a percentage of the sale.
There’s also the technical side. While Ebay has been a major player in the resale space for decades, relative newcomers such as Depop and Vestiaire Collective have raised consumer expectations of the user experience — and Ebay has had to adapt accordingly. Keoghan points to the local shopping feature, which allows people to filter products by distance, Ebay’s move away from bidding towards ‘buy it now’ listings, and new AI features that make it easier for sellers to upload items and edit the background out of images. Behind the scenes, Ebay acquired NFT marketplace Known Origin in 2022 as well as digital ID technology Certilogo in 2023, hoping to keep abreast of incoming circular economy legislation and protect against counterfeits in the secondhand market.
“We’ve had competition for years, in all of our categories,” says Keoghan. “Having best-in-class programmes is really important to show consumers we are listening to what is important to them. We’ll continue to make improvements and tweak things.”
All of this is well and good, but it doesn’t tackle the bigger issue of emissions. Like many resale platforms, Ebay struggles to reduce its indirect emissions, because it doesn’t actually produce the items it sells. This is why it created the Circular Fashion Innovation Fund in 2022, another partnership with the BFC, which funnels investment into small businesses, social enterprises and charities specialising in circular fashion. The fund, which offers up to six £25,000 grants each year, has in the past been awarded to repair, alteration and customisation platform The Seam and peer-to-peer rental platform By Rotation, among others.
Thinking beyond the individual company is a good place to start with building a more circular economy, says Souchet, because the whole point is to build a broader system that enables products and materials to circulate more easily, while incentivising different stakeholders to do so.
“The big picture ambition of the circular economy is to keep products in use and decouple revenues from production,” he explains. “Looking at it through a broader lens, we should track the evolution of primary versus secondary markets, and whether one is taking consumer spend away from the other. This means measuring success in the circular transition cannot necessarily be done by looking at an individual company. The goal is to create an ecosystem of players that together create a circular economy, not to have an ecosystem of circular companies.”
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