Blog: Fashion, Uncensored.

Welcome to the fashion democracy.

This is the phrase that saluted me from the automatically generated email that hailed my sign-up to Asos’ new venture, Asos Marketplace. It’s a development that allows fledgling fashion traders and designers (along with the more established) an opportunity to have their wares sold under the Asos brand, thus giving them a hell of a lot more attention from consumers and a far wider automatic audience than they’d have gotten alone.

You have to apply to Asos for a boutique, and if selected you will be able to customise this boutique to your brand’s preferences. Your boutique will be neatly shelved in one of four sections; multi-brand, independent labels, vintage, and emerging designer. There’s also a blog and a friendly community style ethos, similar to the Asos Life section which can be found on the main site. It feeds off that current buzz surrounding fashion blogging and the aforementioned ‘democracy’ of the consumer posting their opinions online and garnering interest in said comments.

The boutique section is only a section of Asos Marketplace, your average ebay-style bedroom vendor is also welcome to sell their old clothing on a slightly separate section of the site. There’s one catch though – you must photograph your clothes on real-life folk in street-style photoshoots. Their motto for this? ‘If it’s worth selling, it’s worth styling’. Fair enough, I suppose, but it does promote that mentality that you are selling a look or a style rather than a specific item. Ebayers buy into this mentality, which is why so many second-rate clothes are sold for increased prices under the false ‘vintage’ label that many sellers have ascertained will substantially hike up their profits.

To try to put it succinctly, I love second-hand and vintage but hate ebay; it's far too fickle for my liking and the sellers are mostly hawkers selling non-vintage items at vintage prices. I think a lot of people have fallen out of love with ebay since its inception but have yet to find a site that has been able to compete with the monopolic (this adjective derives from ‘monopoly’ and yes I did make it up) giant, partly due to their inability to research effectively and partly because ebay is massive and has the resources to keep up expensive advertising campaigns that enable it to price other competitors out of the market. (Oh, so that's what monopolic means). Asos, being one of the biggest success stories of the dot.com revolution clearly has the manpower to combat ebay, along with fashion credentials that means in the ‘pre-loved’ (I didn’t make that one up, that’s actually what people have euphemistically started labelling second-hand objects) clothing industry, it is able to win the war against ebay, and not just the battle.

(Read the Asos Manifesto for all the details, from Asos' point of view.)

Anyway, enough whining, I’m as fooled by the ‘all fur coat, no knickers’ mentality as much as the rest of the fashion pack. I’ve scoured the site for my favourite items, and this is them:

Alexander Wang Backpack, Browns, £755 (eek)