These Are Not Real Clothes
Using AI to sell vintage is even worse than you think
I think it may have all started with the Depop Cinch.
Also called the “Depop Scrunch,” the name refers to a product display technique in which a seller arranges a top or a dress in a flat lay photo style, gathered tightly in the middle to appear as though it has a tiny waist. It’s important to note that the top itself has a tiny waist. The Depop Cinch doesn’t work on a real body.
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The Cinch spread across all resale platforms but was most popular on Depop, the favored app for Gen Z shoppers and sellers. The statistically younger Depop user is more clued in to internet culture, faster to adopt online trends and move in sync with algorithm changes. Despite the almost comical nature of The Cinch when described anthropologically like I am here, it works. Dozens of online videos are dedicated to teaching you how to cinch to make sales. For a while it felt like The Cinch was everywhere, going so far that people had even begun to cinch hoodies and jackets.
Inevitably some naive shoppers were actually duped, sad and confused by the un-snatched reality of the sweater they bought once they opened their package. But most most people understood that The Cinch wasn’t “real.” Shoppers knew on some level that the clothes didn’t actually look like that, but they loved the illusion so much that they were willing to literally buy into it. This secondhand top wasn’t just a top. It was skinny. It was an hourglass body type. It was literally not shaped like any real person. The Cinch sold you a fantasy of a top. And if the price was low enough, the reality of the top didn’t even matter.
A lot of people are willing to spend $12 on a fantasy.
Online shopping is already detached. Customers are entirely reliant on photos and descriptions and measurements to piece together what a garment might be like in real life. If you’re lucky, there’s photos from every angle, fiber content information, and detailed copy. If you’re unlucky, there’s barely more than one blurry, poorly lit iPhone photo. You don’t get to touch, you don’t get to try on, and you definitely don’t get to smell (an important qualifier when it comes to vintage). Secondhand shopping is especially tenuous, with sellers relying on the trust of virtual strangers to properly communicate the one-of-a-kind item they’re offering. Worse still, online vintage is often final sale.
But even sellers that utilize the Depop Cinch usually include alternate photos. The ridiculous Jessica Rabbit-ed version of a dress hooks you from the search feed, but just a few swipes reveal the dress laid out with its real life proportions. Any serious seller includes measurements, least of which includes the waist. The Cinch is gimmicky but effective, obscuring the truth just enough to entice you to stop scrolling.
The Depop Cinch feels like an important marker of a new communication style, exclusive to secondhand shopping online. The technique is only used by independent web sellers, never adopted by mainstream fashion. It’s a product of algorithms, a way to capture attention in an endlessly growing feed of products. The Cinch is a workaround, allowing sellers to offer the suggestion of a body without the labor, tools, and access required to actually present one. It signaled a growing emphasis on listings as content, forgoing the reality of what you were selling for an image created solely to entice online attention.
I’m seeing The Cinch less these days. I’m hopeful that increasingly discerning shoppers are tired of the blatant obfuscation, but I think the novelty may have just worn off. But in its place, I’m seeing a new, more evil type of listing pop up: ones with AI generated product images.
A garment regurgitated through AI only gives you the vaguest idea of what a piece of clothing might be like. It’s the results of a game of dystopian telephone: a person feeds something to a dataset, the dataset then offers you an interpretation of that person’s original description. The AI generated image you’re seeing lacks any real information about texture, fit, drape, fabric, or construction because the clothing in the image doesn’t even exist.
If vintage clothing is the pig, AI is the sausage grinder.
I’ve seen AI renderings of knitwear in which the label inexplicably floated on the front of a dress form, a sloppy attempt at presenting the garment and its designer tag in one take. In countless other listings, the buttons on an AI-generated sweater change in number and placement between photos. The best case scenario is a soulless amalgam of a “person” wearing an “outfit,” the worst case scenario is a dead-eyed figure missing fingers and teeth, wearing an impossible garment with zippers that lead to nowhere.
And of course, the tech will improve. But that only makes it scarier.
While there are undoubtedly some tech ghouls invading the secondhand space as a unashamed money grab, I don’t think most people are using this technology nefariously. And to me, that actually makes it worse.
As a professional vintage dealer who relied almost entirely on online sales for years, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s hard. So hard, in fact, that I shuttered my beloved online store earlier this year. I had the privilege and access of a room to fit a 10’ seamless backdrop, a nice camera with a flip screen and a wireless remote, a ring light, and, maybe most importantly, a conventionally attractive and standard sized body to model the clothes. And I still failed.
The systems that secondhand sellers depend on require certain optics. More appealing content means more eyes, more eyes mean more sales, and images and listings that include bodies and faces perform better. AI is infinitely cheaper, faster, and more convenient than hiring models, or even photographing yourself or a mannequin. There are a lot of reasons people might feel like they need to utilize generative AI, and the platforms sellers rely on are exploiting those perceived needs by rewarding its use.
I think that the Depop Cinch unintentionally opened the door to trickery. It proved that buyers would embrace a certain level of manipulation, an affirmation that presenting a garment in an unattainable way could actually increase your chances of selling it. The success of The Cinch was proof of the almighty power of optics. How your clothing appeared online took precedence over the reality of the clothing itself, pushing sellers to focus on presentation even when it meant abandoning quality or honesty. On top of that, it was easy, and free - if you don’t count fatphobia and triggering body dysmorphia as a cost.
The algorithms have trained us to value appearance above all else, so it’s no surprise that sellers are turning to AI. You probably already know that every single use of generative AI consumes water and electricity, which is turned into potentially unchecked emissions. But beyond that, new studies suggest ChatGPT is eroding critical thinking skills, that AI generated images are becoming more difficult to identify, and an alarming number of people are reporting “AI psychosis.” I’ve also noticed than an overwhelming majority of the AI generated “models” in secondhand product listings are thin and white.
AI use for online sales isn’t just misleading or annoying. It’s actively harming the planet, our communities, and probably (definitely) your brain. The more normalized it becomes, the faster we forget how to even identify it. I’ve had brilliant friends unintentionally send me AI slop on Instagram, because the speed and comfort of our feeds is designed for you to overlook the obvious. Secondhand shopping is an essential resource, especially online, and maintaining trust and discernment is absolutely vital for keeping it alive. In order to buy something, I need to see real photos of it. And only real photos.
Every problem we face in the secondhand economy ends up coming back to the oppressive systems we all operate under. The villains are always the same: it’s the corporations, it’s the billionaires, it’s the tech giants pushing AI features on every app and platform. You should absolutely stop giving your money to big brands that are promoting generative AI. But you should also refrain from giving your money to secondhand sellers using it too. I don’t want to punish individuals just trying to make a living, but the proven harms of AI greatly outweigh the need to sell a dress. The data has proven that generative AI is a direct attack on all of the reasons so many of us love vintage in the first place: sustainability, creativity, and community.
If I see you presenting an AI generated image for item you’re selling, you’ve immediately lost my trust. I have to assume that you don’t really care about clothes, because you’re not showing me clothes. You’re showing me the idea of clothes. You’re showing me clothes as spoon-fed to a program, as interpreted by a data set, spit back out in an unsettling mush made up of a million stolen images.
And as someone who really gives a fuck about vintage, I just want you to show me the actual clothes.
