The image above is a still taken from the popular 2004 American teen comedy film, Mean Girls. In this image, we can see the main characters of the movie sporting high heels, miniskirts, and small designer handbags that screamed early-2000s fashion (Tschinkel, 2021). This early 2000s fashion, also known as Y2K fashion, has been making a steady comeback in the past couple of years and this can be attributed to the fact that fashion is inherently cyclical. Known as the 20-year rule, every decade reintroduces itself every 20 years or so and recently, Generation Z has returned to the nostalgic aesthetic of the early 2000s. Yogita Anbuchezhian MMCC2080 Network Cultures Creative Research Report So what exactly does Y2K fashion consist of? Some of the staple pieces include cropped lace camisoles, pleated and colourful miniskirts, low rise denim skirts or jeans, button-up cardigans, tie-front shirts and matching tracksuit sets. One of the most important aspects of this style is the accessories. A pair of sunshades, bandannas, colourful butterfly hair clips, gold or silver chunky chain jewellery, high heels and mini baguette handbags are some of the many accessories that can be used to make a statement (Gill, 2021). The revival of Y2K fashion began as it moved from being a “predominantly youth-oriented subculture” to a “mainstream, all-encompassing term” referring to the fashionable, throwback style (Oh, 2021). Social media has undoubtedly played a big part in its comeback. The revival of this style has been boosted by Instagram aesthetic accounts, like the one in the image above, which post noughties throwback images and videos. Users get inspiration from these pages and look for places to source and find similar outfits. Covid-19 has resulted in a loss for a lot of businesses and the fashion industry is one of them. Fashion retail sales plunged as shops shut down, events were cancelled and consumer shopping behaviour changed significantly. However, there seem to be some exceptions to the current crisis faced by the fashion industry. It has been reported that there has been a steady increase in sales and traffic on online retail stores, especially resale platforms, ever since the start of the pandemic. The second-hand market has mostly withstood the economic recession brought about by the pandemic (Zwettler, 2020). The youth today value sustainability and social change while also wanting to keep to a small budget, and this perceived want to consume products both ethically and swiftly has led to an expansion in the online resale and second-hand market in particular, especially after the Covid-19 crisis struck. To summarise, the 20-year fashion cycle has revived Y2K fashion in current times and this has been facilitated by social media and an increase in online shopping on resale platforms. This in itself is a cycle of its own, where the growing interest in Y2K fashion leads to more consumers joining the second-hand and resale communities on these online platforms which in turn makes these platforms more popular and catches the interest of more people, who are then exposed to the Y2K fashion trend. I will now be exploring how online resale platforms contribute to the revival of Y2K fashion culture today, by using the online application known as Depop as my case study and how it is an effective culture-making tool which has its own growing community. Between April and June 2020 alone, Depop saw a 163% year-over-year (YoY) increase in new user signups, a 200% YoY increase in traffic and a 300% YoY uptick in listings sold (Knickerbocker, 2020). Depop was founded in 2011 by Simon Beckerman. It is an online resale platform that centres around the idea of selling new, used, or previously owned second-hand items. It provides users all over the world a platform where they can, in Depop’s own words, “buy, sell, discover, and explore the most inspiring and unique things.” Users take photos of their clothing and post them to their profiles so that they can be found and bought by other interested users. Depop believes that the reselling of clothes preserves the environment, creates new connections and new ideas. It strives for a circular fashion model that enables the redistribution of pre-loved clothing. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) and while there are many online resale platforms, what makes Depop stand out from its competition is its interface. Bolter & Grusin (1999) state that “when artists or technicians create the apparatus for a new medium, they do so with reference to previous media and they borrow and adapt materials and techniques whenever possible.” Depop has a double-tap heart feature with which users can ‘like’ items. There is an explore page that users can use to find items of interest. You have the option to follow anyone you want, look through their feed of listings, and leave comments on them or even message the seller directly. Much of the layout and features are influenced by popular social media applications, such as Instagram and Twitter, which makes the Depop application all the more appealing to the masses. It “appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). Lists create order, allowing producers to effectively communicate information while enabling consumers to navigate the perceived information flow easily (Young, 2013) and on Depop this can be seen from the way lists are used on their application. As seen above, users can add and arrange information about their product in their listings. More importantly, they are able to tag their listings with keywords so that when others are searching for similar items, they will be able to find them easily. Keywords are important terms used by search engines to map data on the internet and “information technologies would not function without specific keywords” (Peters, 2016). In the above image, it can be seen how searching ‘Y2K’ produces a list of items that have been tagged with #Y2K. The products are arranged according to how relevant they are to the search term and further filters, such as particular colours or sizes, can be applied to narrow down and reorganise the search results. A medium is that which remediates (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) and in the case of Depop, it remediates how preloved clothing is resold by giving it a new meaning and in turn, forming a new subculture. These clothes are no longer just second-hand items being sold at lowered prices. They are a part of Depop’s own aesthetic, something that was created due to the fact that, according to the platform, 90% of their current users are 26 years old and under. The application has become “associated with a niche, vintage, one-of-a-kind style thanks to their Generation Z and Millennial target audience” (Oh, 2021). Y2K fashion, which is the most popular hashtag on the platform, has come to be “synonymous with Depop style and is used as a way of adding social ‘value’ to an item” as users will be willing to spend more if they believe an item to be Y2K (The Digital Fairy, 2020). Depop reevaluates how online marketplaces usually function by paying extra attention to the communication between users. Depop is “more than an app or a platform; it’s a youth community, social ecosystem and consumer movement” (The Digital Fairy, 2020). It has become instrumental in the revival of the Y2K fashion culture, holding the value of what a fashion magazine or a college fashion club might have held when one was looking to involve themselves in this culture. On Depop, users can purchase and sell clothing. They can also “like, follow, share, save, strike up DM conversations, surf for style tips, make friends, build a following, launch businesses, start trends, upcycle, and connect with other users around the world” (The Digital Fairy, 2020). This organic communication that Depop has built-in has cultivated a subculture that has led to the formation of a community of its own. Borschke (2020) says that “all media was always already social” and that “storage, reproduction, and circulation have always been culture-making activities”. In this case, the circulation of ideas about Y2K fashion happens when there is a desire to reproduce outfits users might have spotted on other social media platforms such as Instagram. These users, also named “Depop girls”, typically refer to individuals who utilize the resale platform to “sell a curated collection of items that were purchased at thrift stores and then flipped for a higher price” (Oh, 2021) and are some of the biggest benefactors that keep the Y2K fashion culture alive. Depop girls are an “indicator of the cultural zeitgeist” (Oh, 2021) and they are part of the aforementioned huge community this platform has amassed. This community is so functional that it has seeped into other social media platforms. User-run Instagram meme accounts, Reddit forums and Facebook fan groups have been created to let Depop grow further as a subculture, which is complete with its “own culture, humour, behaviours, aesthetic, social system, values and economy” (The Digital Fairy, 2020). However, before Depop and Depop girls came into existence, there were brick-and-mortar vintage stores and marketplaces. The remediation of material practice is inextricable from the remediation of social arrangements and this is because practitioners in the new medium may want to claim the status of those who worked in an earlier medium (Bolter & Grusin, 1999), as can be seen from how Depop calls itself a “fashion marketplace where the next generation comes to discover unique items.” A marketplace is a mechanism that locates people who want to sell items and people who want to buy said items and provides them with a medium to interact, while the marketplace owner takes a cut of the sales made (Brady, 2018). While the term traditionally referred to physical locations where humans could engage in trade, it has since evolved due to digitisation, although it still holds many of the same principles. As Peters (2016) states, “digital media point and refer to real-world objects outside of themselves.” Today, the marketplace has become “an economic model embedded into the community” (Brady, 2018) and digital marketplaces such as Depop are popping up everywhere. These new mediums have to find their economic place by replacing or supplementing what is already available, in this case, physical marketplaces and other existing digital marketplaces, by convincing consumers that the new medium improves on the experience of older ones which will then lead to popular acceptance and economic success (Bolter & Grusin, 1999), which Depop has been successful at. Media such as Depop “are digital in the simple sense that humans interface with them digitally, or with our fingers via manual manipulation and push buttons” (Peters, 2016). Digitisation is enabling existing forms of media to be imported into digital spaces to borrow and repurpose them in new ways. While some may think this practice to be new, “redistribution of ‘new old’ media draws from technologies that have been transformed in the digital era” (Novak, 2011). In this case, I believe that second-hand fashion is “remediated by being transferred from one media context to another to create new media, but also new subjects of mediated culture” (Novak, 2011). Depop, a digital marketplace, enables second-hand fashion, which is traditionally found in thrift shops and charity shops, to be reformed and resold as trendy Y2K fashion, which not only promotes a much more sustainable way of living but also contributes to the further revival of the early 2000s fashion culture today. The medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action (McLuhan, 2005) and Depop has different platform affordances that allow for the revival and circulation of culture. It acts as a distribution channel where preowned clothing finds new meaning and owners but also acts as a culture-making platform that has a community of its own, enabling like-minded people to connect and exchange ideas, and these are ways in which it effectively boosts the revival of Y2K fashion today.