I recently purchased a pair of shoes (see above) on Vestiaire Collective. They look great but they didn’t fit; I gave them to Louise and Louise paid me back by ordering a new pair from a different brand at the same price in exchange. She hasn’t worn them yet, that I know of. They’re sitting on the shoe rack in our entryway, looking just like they did on the picture on the website, and now there are two versions of this pair of shoes in my life: the singular pair, next to my Nike’s, and the infinite iterations of the exact same pair following me across the internet.
First, a brief aside about my user journey on Vestiaire Collective. I do a lot of work with and around secondhand fashion but don’t really buy a lot of it myself, typically because I really only wear the kind of basics that don’t lend themselves well to the resale market: white t-shirts, black jeans, white sneakers. But rather than buy a new pair of black shoes for the fall, I figured I’d get a pair on Vestiaire Collective. I found this really cool pair of Eytys, unworn, new-in-box with tags.
I also made the unfortunate decision of placing the order from my work computer, which has a less powerful adblock and lower security settings than my personal computer. Before making a purchase, I went and checked them out a few times, negotiated with the buyer, and maybe stared longingly at them while waiting for shipping confirmation. This means I amassed a ton of cookies, and I’m now getting ads for a pair of shoes I already own on every website I visit.
Typically, e-commerce images are designed to be as generic and accurate as possible, a sort of idealized average of a given product. If there are stains or flyaway threads, they’ll be photoshopped away; any item with “natural” variance, like a linen dress, will be edited to remove any wrinkles that would otherwise most certainly develop from being worn on a model’s body. Generally, when an ad for an item of clothing shows up everywhere, we’re supposed to imagine that the item you’d receive (should you give in and purchase) would be exactly like the one pictured. This is a diplomatic agreement between you and the seller: you’ll get one that looks just like it, but not that specific one.
Images on Vestiaire Collective aren’t treated in the same way. First, while this doubtless happens with some frequency, Photoshopping items to make them look their best is officially discouraged. If there are scuffs on a pair of shoes, they should be visible, if there’s a small stain on a dress, it should be photographed. The idea is to show an item as it “truly” exists in physical reality, favoring uniqueness and singularity where traditional e-commerce images favor multiplicity and genericness.
This is because what is being sold is not one of potentially hundreds of thousands of items in a warehouse, but a rarified and singular object, one that has already entered circulation in the social world and lived a life before coming to you. Vestiaire Collective’s imperative, of course, seems more about convincing the user that this life has been negligible or in some cases non-existent (new with tags! Never worn!) - leaving room for you, the new owner, to write your own story with and on the item. Leave your own creases, earn your own stains, etc.
Back to the shoes following me around the internet. Despite being “new with tags,” they’re visibly unique in a way e-commerce images aren’t. The amateur photography is evident, you can see where the flash shines off the black patent in a specific spot, where dust collects on the oversized soles.
There’s no denying it’s the very “same” pair of shoes currently sitting in my entryway, but the shoes that don’t fit me and the shoes popping up on the Slate.fr sidebar are two different objects: one exists in my physical reality, and the other pair of shoes, digitally material, affords travel across the whole wide Internet.
A few years ago, Sherlock (2014) published an article* about the “sticky soles'' of Clark’s shoes that afforded the performance of particular shuffling dance moves by their wearers, the execution of which would become a key signifier for participation in the indie rock scene in the north of England in the late 1990’s. But beyond physical motions, the stick soles of Clark’s shoes also afforded the keeping of memory and the mark of time - mud caked from festivals, blades of grass, even someone’s hair. They held onto memory and being in a deeply profound way.
Like sticky Clark’s soles Sherlock wrote about, the digital Eytys lace-ups also have distinct affordances for memory and movement through social life. I might never wear them to a festival (I mean, Louise might), and their digital soles might never wear down or collect dirt. But they move in a way the physical pair can’t - they’re on Business of Fashion and Vox and The Atlantic - and they afford recall in a way the physical pair don’t. If I wanted to stop thinking about the physical pair, I might put them away in the closet. The digitally material version is a whole heck of a lot stickier.
In a way, I think this stickiness has an interesting relationship with the rise of the secondhand market. It asks us to consider the singularity of the digital object, to develop closer relationships with specific parts of the digital world, even as they exist in infinite ephemera. It signifies a shift from engaging with e-commerce images - which are by nature indistinguishable - to images of specific objects which are both fundamentally born of and entirely divorced from their physical counterparts.
This, by the way, is the broad theoretical construct that gave us the NFT, or non-fungible token. NFTs are a tool for rendering digital objects fundamentally singular and rare, an affordance they’ve lacked in the 30-something years of Internet prior to the NFT. Historically, social scientists have characterized human relationships with objects as predicated on notions of uniqueness and engagement: like Sherlock’s Clark’s, the wear and tear and use of an object over time transformed it from commodity to possession to treasured object.
It’s funny to think that for all of the discourse about how the Internet would forever modify the relationship between ownership and possession (you can possess your Spotify songs but not own them, and vice versa), things really haven’t shifted all that much. Connecting with an object means engaging with that object alone, leaving your grubby little (virtual) pawprints all over it. In order to render digital objects truly important and valuable, we had to find a way to make them singular - a way to make them ours.
That’s how there came to be a pair of shoes in my house that I possess, but do not truly own (they belong to Louise), and which I own (they’re sitting in my entryway) but do not truly possess: they’re still up on the website, still available to be viewed and “cookied” and live a whole, infinite life online without me. They’ll gather meaning through movement and exchange, they’ll end up on someone’s Pinterest where they’ll mean one thing, they’ll show up here and on my Instagram and on yours, in your feed, where they’ll signify something else entirely. The digitally material versions of those shoes will go a lot farther than the leather ones in the hall, even with the same little mark on the leather upper.
I recently purchased a pair of shoes (see above) on Vestiaire Collective. They look great but they didn’t fit; I gave them to Louise and Louise paid me back by ordering a new pair from a different brand at the same price in exchange. She hasn’t worn them yet, that I know of. They’re sitting on the shoe rack in our entryway, looking just like they did on the picture on the website, and now there are two versions of this pair of shoes in my life: the singular pair, next to my Nike’s, and the infinite iterations of the exact same pair following me across the internet.
First, a brief aside about my user journey on Vestiaire Collective. I do a lot of work with and around secondhand fashion but don’t really buy a lot of it myself, typically because I really only wear the kind of basics that don’t lend themselves well to the resale market: white t-shirts, black jeans, white sneakers. But rather than buy a new pair of black shoes for the fall, I figured I’d get a pair on Vestiaire Collective. I found this really cool pair of Eytys, unworn, new-in-box with tags.
I also made the unfortunate decision of placing the order from my work computer, which has a less powerful adblock and lower security settings than my personal computer. Before making a purchase, I went and checked them out a few times, negotiated with the buyer, and maybe stared longingly at them while waiting for shipping confirmation. This means I amassed a ton of cookies, and I’m now getting ads for a pair of shoes I already own on every website I visit.
Typically, e-commerce images are designed to be as generic and accurate as possible, a sort of idealized average of a given product. If there are stains or flyaway threads, they’ll be photoshopped away; any item with “natural” variance, like a linen dress, will be edited to remove any wrinkles that would otherwise most certainly develop from being worn on a model’s body. Generally, when an ad for an item of clothing shows up everywhere, we’re supposed to imagine that the item you’d receive (should you give in and purchase) would be exactly like the one pictured. This is a diplomatic agreement between you and the seller: you’ll get one that looks just like it, but not that specific one.
Images on Vestiaire Collective aren’t treated in the same way. First, while this doubtless happens with some frequency, Photoshopping items to make them look their best is officially discouraged. If there are scuffs on a pair of shoes, they should be visible, if there’s a small stain on a dress, it should be photographed. The idea is to show an item as it “truly” exists in physical reality, favoring uniqueness and singularity where traditional e-commerce images favor multiplicity and genericness.
This is because what is being sold is not one of potentially hundreds of thousands of items in a warehouse, but a rarified and singular object, one that has already entered circulation in the social world and lived a life before coming to you. Vestiaire Collective’s imperative, of course, seems more about convincing the user that this life has been negligible or in some cases non-existent (new with tags! Never worn!) - leaving room for you, the new owner, to write your own story with and on the item. Leave your own creases, earn your own stains, etc.
Back to the shoes following me around the internet. Despite being “new with tags,” they’re visibly unique in a way e-commerce images aren’t. The amateur photography is evident, you can see where the flash shines off the black patent in a specific spot, where dust collects on the oversized soles.
There’s no denying it’s the very “same” pair of shoes currently sitting in my entryway, but the shoes that don’t fit me and the shoes popping up on the Slate.fr sidebar are two different objects: one exists in my physical reality, and the other pair of shoes, digitally material, affords travel across the whole wide Internet.
A few years ago, Sherlock (2014) published an article* about the “sticky soles'' of Clark’s shoes that afforded the performance of particular shuffling dance moves by their wearers, the execution of which would become a key signifier for participation in the indie rock scene in the north of England in the late 1990’s. But beyond physical motions, the stick soles of Clark’s shoes also afforded the keeping of memory and the mark of time - mud caked from festivals, blades of grass, even someone’s hair. They held onto memory and being in a deeply profound way.
Like sticky Clark’s soles Sherlock wrote about, the digital Eytys lace-ups also have distinct affordances for memory and movement through social life. I might never wear them to a festival (I mean, Louise might), and their digital soles might never wear down or collect dirt. But they move in a way the physical pair can’t - they’re on Business of Fashion and Vox and The Atlantic - and they afford recall in a way the physical pair don’t. If I wanted to stop thinking about the physical pair, I might put them away in the closet. The digitally material version is a whole heck of a lot stickier.
In a way, I think this stickiness has an interesting relationship with the rise of the secondhand market. It asks us to consider the singularity of the digital object, to develop closer relationships with specific parts of the digital world, even as they exist in infinite ephemera. It signifies a shift from engaging with e-commerce images - which are by nature indistinguishable - to images of specific objects which are both fundamentally born of and entirely divorced from their physical counterparts.
This, by the way, is the broad theoretical construct that gave us the NFT, or non-fungible token. NFTs are a tool for rendering digital objects fundamentally singular and rare, an affordance they’ve lacked in the 30-something years of Internet prior to the NFT. Historically, social scientists have characterized human relationships with objects as predicated on notions of uniqueness and engagement: like Sherlock’s Clark’s, the wear and tear and use of an object over time transformed it from commodity to possession to treasured object.
It’s funny to think that for all of the discourse about how the Internet would forever modify the relationship between ownership and possession (you can possess your Spotify songs but not own them, and vice versa), things really haven’t shifted all that much. Connecting with an object means engaging with that object alone, leaving your grubby little (virtual) pawprints all over it. In order to render digital objects truly important and valuable, we had to find a way to make them singular - a way to make them ours.
That’s how there came to be a pair of shoes in my house that I possess, but do not truly own (they belong to Louise), and which I own (they’re sitting in my entryway) but do not truly possess: they’re still up on the website, still available to be viewed and “cookied” and live a whole, infinite life online without me. They’ll gather meaning through movement and exchange, they’ll end up on someone’s Pinterest where they’ll mean one thing, they’ll show up here and on my Instagram and on yours, in your feed, where they’ll signify something else entirely. The digitally material versions of those shoes will go a lot farther than the leather ones in the hall, even with the same little mark on the leather upper.