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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).
