She Going Low on my Balls Until I want to Make Her One of my Grails

                                                                            

        

Hi everyone, I am making my big bohos debut today writing about one of my favorite websites, grailed.com. Grailed is similar to an online flea market where you can find clothes from anywhere for prices that you cannot afford. As a loser who enjoys looking at clothes he can’t afford during my classes, grailed is the perfect place to do that, so I can imagine what I could wear if I was employed at all. Grailed has done many wonders to the online clothing industry as an easy location for people to get second hand clothing that they would not be able to find at their normal thrift stores or flea markets. This has also come with a price due to the emergence of clothing resellers that buy clothes at thrift stores with the sole intention of reselling them for profit. Today, we will be covering the intricacies of grailed and the “cultural impact” that it has had.

Why Grailed

           

Figure 1 Some of My Grailed Likes

With the emergence of social media over the years and the rise of rampant consumerism stemming from the media we consume, Grailed is the perfect place for “fashion enthusiasts” to find pieces that they want for prices usually below retail. Unlike other online secondhand marketplaces like Depop, Grailed was designed to be a marketplace for designer clothes and streetwear. Grailed also presents itself as a place where you can sell your designer pieces to make money back from previous purchases on pieces that you might not want anymore. This is great news for the pair of Margelia GATs that have been rotting in your closet because some other loser out there is willing to get their hands on them. Having the option of selling the clothes in order to make money back is also a great option for those who buy clothes seeing some form of possible return. Due to how fashion seasons work, it also allows for pieces that are from past seasons to reenter the market and be worn by some other 15-year-old hype beast. The cycle of selling pieces and buying new ones fits todays social standards of consumerism and always keeping up with the latest fashion trends.

Grailed Trends

            As someone who sadly scrolls through the endless pages of Grailed, I start to notice a lot of trends just by looking at the listings. Grailed has two algorithm sections that sort by your perceived interests in order to show you pieces that fit your interests. There are also general search categories based on certain fashion types (Avant-Garde, Streetwear, Gorpcore, Luxury, Vintage). As someone who likes to look at Avant-garde clothing, the overlap between Avant-Garde and streetwear has become increasingly apparent over the past few years. Avant-Garde has drifted away from its original definition due to how little categories are enforces on Grailed. Seeing the Avant-Garde category degenerate into a blanket term for expensive items instead of what it was orinally intended for can leave a sour taste in the mouths of those specifically looking for Avant-Garde pieces. Another fragmentation that has impacted the Avant-Garde definition are the impacts of celebrities. In numerous Grailed listings you will see celebrities likes A$AP Rocky or Playboi Carti wearing the items that are being sold. The viewpoint that many people on social media have are that these items are instantly Avant-Garde when a celebrity of some note wears them. The common narratives on these celebrities being trendsetters allows people to misinterpret the meaning of true avant-garde wear. An example of this can be seen with the brand Hood By Air, while Hood By Air is traditionally a streetwear brand and has always been in that category, Carti wearing pieces from this brand in his EVILJ0RDAN music video caused many sellers on grailed to place Hood By Air products in the Avant-Garde category. These trends will only become more common in the future at the cost of the true definition of Avant-Garde. 

 

Why does this matter? It doesn’t at all it just inconveniences me because I want to look at Yohji Yamamoto Balloon Pants in my Avant-Garde searches but the plain mislabeling of certain items can cause uneducated buyers to be misled by the people trying to sell for as high as they can. Grailed can be seen as an entry level website for those who are getting into higher-tier fashion that are trying to get their first pieces. While many who have knowledge of fashion still use Grailed, it can be the only source of knowledge of certain pieces and labels. This mislabeling epidemic can be a serious issue for a website that advertises itself as a place to get authentic second hand clothes. If the search engine can’t show items that are authentic to the categories they are in, how can one trust that the items they are buying are real? While it is impossible and a waste of time to properly categorize the thousands of listings that show up every day, properly advertising pieces and making sure they are placed into correct categories helps the buyers experience a lot in terms of when a buyer is just shopping around. Grailed has made attempts to differentiate Avant-Garde and Streetwear by creating the Archive category. Archive fashion is a term that was coined to describe older pieces that were made by famous brands such as Raf Simons or Maison Margelia that are no longer being made by the brands. This category was removed within days as it was flooded by streetwear and other items that didn’t fit the category at all. The general search categories on Grailed are sort of a lost cause as the people who make the listings care more about how many people see it rather than them being accurate since the more categories you put an item in, the more it is seen by people searching. There is also no real reason for Grailed to enforce this as more sales means more money for them out of commissions so the problem will seemingly never be solved.

Even without the profit motive infecting Grailed and its sellers, education on these categories is failing as well. Fashion and social media have always been hand-in-hand with how they interact but with the pandemic and TikTok rising up, many people not knowledgeable in fashion are able to find inspiration very easily with the amount of “fashion influencers” on TikTok or other platforms. Some of these influencers do not do a good job in making truly educational content and are prone to mislabeling items to their audience. This has gravely impacted the Avant-Garde and Archive fashion categories as many people jump to conclusions that have a misconstrued view of how these fashion archetypes work. Going with that, many influencers mislabel these pieces on purpose in order to gain views and interactions on their content. There are no real consequences for this as well as people are a hivemind that will believe anything they see on the internet. Fashion mislabeling is a very real thing that happens and there is no real solution to stopping it unless we get rid of the profit motive as a society.

Conclusion

            As someone who has spent a lot of time on Grailed but has only bought a total of two items off, it is sad to see how the site has developed as a result of social media. In the end, there is no real issue with how pieces are categorized as long as they are authentic. There are many other ways to research certain pieces that you can eventually search for on online marketplaces if you intend to buy them. While there are many other ways to buy second hand designeer clothes online like through Yahoo Auctions in Japan or Facebook Marketplace/Depop, there really is nothing like Grailed to me with how easy it is to search for certain items or themes that you want to encase and that is why I keep coming back. I also don’t have a job and am bored all the time so I have nothing else to do. I hope that you enjoyed this meaningless wall of text about a website that only societies biggest outcasts frequent and please stop wearing blue jeans if you are a man. Thank you.