A bubble is a fragile thing: coming to the surface of a rolling boil, or blown through a thin wand dipped in dollar store soap, the pure pleasure comes from the too-satisfying impulse to see it pop. The bigger the bubble, the better the burst.

Outside of what’s literal or physical, a bubble is an overinflated sensibility made actual to the peril of those who believe in it; just like the real thing, looking through a bubble’s surface will warp what you see on the other side.

On the other hand, bubbles can protect or defend what’s inside. Small clusters of groups and cliques, teams and communities, often overlap to make something stronger, linking together and joining efforts while preserving what makes them special.

It’s September, a month that often feels like stepping back inside time. We’re thinking about the small systems that organize our world, the way we join or choose groups, the bubbles above and around and inside ourselves and each other. Delicate and distinct, the stories this week are all about ever-expanding definitions of where we fit in.

There’s a story in every well-kept 1950s beaded cardigan or covetable Gunne Sax prom dress turned modern #cottagecore look, but on most consignment sites, buyers rarely get to hear them. One of the draws of seeking out vintage clothing is the fantasy of absorbing a garment’s past life, yet most places that sell vintage are more interested in obscuring previous owners. At the luxury consignment shop The RealReal any indication that someone else owned a dress for decades is erased entirely, the professionally photographed designer clothing hanging on stark white mannequins ripped from any department store. Etsy and Ebay, once the holy grail for thrift store gems, privilege straightforward business.

Meanwhile, on Depop, the clothes for sale are frequently tethered to the girls exorcising them straight from their personal closets. @trustfundgoth’s profile on Depop, the Gen Z-approved clothing reselling app, is filled with museum-worthy designer gems: Aya Takano x Issey Miyake sets from his fall 2004 collection, Jean Paul Gaultier mini-dresses, mod Pierre Cardin outfits in perfect condition. “When I first moved to New York, I wanted to see how long it would take me to get banned from tinder,” begins a listing for $1,600 Vivienne Westwood boots. “I wanted to get banned from tinder so I sold feet pics for roughly two weeks having my on app occupation as “foot model” and my employer as ‘Venmo’.”

Alongside high flash photos of @trustfundgoth, a petite, sullen looking brunette modeling against the backdrop of her messy apartment, she offers chaotic details of her life in listing captions for her 13,000 Depop followers. “I feel like I blew off WEEKS texting this dude random shit that I later decided I was going to copy paste onto here to use as captions but nooooooooo I had to accidentally delete the entire chat log,” she writes for the listing of a $650 Alexander McQueen top. An $800 Hussein Chalayan skirt comes with the news that her mother has COVID-19 (“At minimum you’d look better than mother, sweaty ass b**** needs to wash up before calling me bc shes ‘bored,’” she writes) and a listing for a Balenciaga dress notes that “it’s kinda scary taking pictures in here because someone was like potentially murdered in my building like ... full grown man found at the bottom of trash chute in critical condition type shit and I don’t want to say it was because he was taking selfies.”

The dramatic captions, the off-the-cuff photos, the confusing mystery as to how a 21-year-old student amassed a collection of vintage clothing worth tens of thousands of dollars, make @trustfundgoth’s account feel like the kind of personal blog that has almost gone extinct. Every time @trustfundgoth stops mid-listing to reveal that her mother told her “not to date guys if they sound fragile” because “it’d be best for my GPA if nobody kills themselves due to me,” I’m reminded of a messier, confessional Internet, where girls presumed nobody was reading their unpolished ramblings about ex-boyfriends and scuffed shoes they just can’t give up. A juvenile diary tucked into the captions of a Depop account, the page is reminiscent of an Internet all about glossy, uninspired microcelebrity. Every one of her fantastical posts leaves readers wanting more, as if each item’s descriptor is another episode in the TV show that is Kol’s privileged life, its chaos emphasized for the highest viewership possible. In her cynical stream-of-consciousness, admitting she isn’t sure if her maid quit or not, complaining about her parents not giving her more money as she uploads a John Galliano t-shirt, @trustfundgoth’s page is like an episode of blog-centric Gossip Girl if Blair Waldorf ditched Oscar de la Renta for Jacquemus.

A SCROLL OF A PROFILE IS AN INTIMATE CLOSET REVEAL, A STORY OF SOMEONE’S PERSONAL STYLE PAST AND PRESENT BUILT GARMENT BY GARMENT.

In reality, @trustfundgoth is Mika Kol, a business student living in New York’s financial district who has spoken before about growing her collection of vintage as a shop girl in Houston. Her Depop tales of selling feet photos and kicking her ex in the face may be an embellished version of her life, but a captivating version nonetheless. Even the most boring mini-skirt suddenly becomes enticing when Kol has a story to tell about wearing it. Her captions and off-kilter photography might not make the more eccentric clothes anymore wearable to the average buyer (a Dolce & Gabbana vest suit is a tall order), but there’s something defusing about her postings. The luxury designer clothing, often pictured alongside photos of the pieces on the runway, become far less intimidating crumpled on the floor of an apartment building hallway. The captions seem to ask: “Can’t you imagine this Vivienne Westwood flung as carelessly across the room in your own dirty apartment?”

Clothes go far on Depop with good branding, like when sellers rename what are clearly children’s t-shirts from suburban charity shops as “Y2K baby tees.” But most accounts feature women like @trustfundgoth selling off their own wardrobe loaded with history. A scroll of a profile is an intimate closet reveal, a story of someone’s personal style past and present built garment by garment. A seller’s identity emerges through their style: gothic prairie, cult Japanese streetwear obsessive. “Should I even be selling this?” is a frequent refrain in captions. Where an Etsy seller specializing in vintage dresses might take great care to list measurements and point out small stains, on Depop sellers frequently forgo such details. The exact waist size of a dress doesn’t seem to matter as much as pointing out that it’s one of the seller’s “personal favorites.” It isn’t just that @trustfundgoth is selling a yard666sale piece, but that she also wore it “with opera length tabi gloves, Buffalo London’s, and a dual tone 70s gown made of santana to get d*ck.” A Vivienne Tam dress, from the designer’s 1995 breakout collection that featured mesh dresses printed with artist Zhang Hontu’s cartoonish paintings of Mao Zedong, is pictured laying on a backdrop of corporate carpeting, its $2,500 listed price seemingly irrelevant in determining the quality of the photos. “Like ok??? Just bc I don’t live on Wall Street anymore doesn’t mean I’m that home!” the caption continues. “Very clearly a capitalist!”

@trustfundgoth’s Depop recreates a mid-aughts era of style blogging, when strangers with no ties to the fashion industry shared imperfect photos of their lived-in outfits online. Their self-timer photos and mirror selfies of Goodwill scores shared on now rusted platforms like Livejournal and Blogspot often accompanied funny, confessional descriptions. You learned about a blogger’s life alongside their outfit choices as they posted fragmented ramblings about their dead-end day jobs or celebrity crushes with photos of their new favorite tartan skirt. While today’s influencers build followings posting anesthetized photos of perfectly curated and gifted outfits in thinly veiled advertisements, fashion blogging was beauty itself: imperfect, messy, well-worn. Bloggers weren’t celebrated for what clothes they wore so much as what stories they told with them. On Depop, sellers package every garment with snippets from an inner monologue as if it were ornate gift-wrapping.

Moving through Depop, it’s easy to confuse your desire for the clothes with the way sellers wear them, love them, and write about them. If @trustfundgoth is a character, her constantly updated feed dramatized fiction replete with Chalayan and Gaultier, it’s a drama I can’t stop tuning into. In the cold, clean landscape of online shopping and modern style blogging, @trustfungoth’s designer wardrobe does not accompany a lifestyle of manicured perfection: she makes each Chanel skirt and Miu Miu bra a pedestrian prop in the funny, staged Manhattanite drama of her account. Why show clothes in their best light when you can show them as they really are? Wrinkled, a bit damaged, and infused with the stories of owners who’ve loved them.

Originally published on 09/21/20