The business of style remains largely in the grasp of male designers and CEOs. But on Poshmark, Mercari, and Depop, if you want to buy clothing, you are probably going to have to go through a woman. And that woman is most likely going to be nice to you. Something strange has developed between sellers and buyers on clothing resale sites: a culture of being nice.
A million “Thank you, girly!”s does not demonstrate that women are inherently nicer than men, or softer, or that a matriarchy would replace a lust for war with a lust for exclamation points. It’s just that on these sites, which comprise women running small and micro businesses, it is considered most expedient to be unfailingly polite, direct, and warm. “It’s very much triple exclamation marks, triple question marks,” ChiChi, a 20-year-old Depop seller in Massachusetts, tells Glamour. “There’s a certain way they use emojis; it’s a particular heart. I often joke about this, but I actually love it.” ChiChi started selling casually, to clean out her closet, but when she sold three items on her first day on the app, she realized she could make real money through resale. Her buyers, predominantly women and occasionally nonbinary people, mostly teens and early 20s, refer to her as “bb.” She’s used to them sliding into her DMs just to say, “I’m obsessed with this top.”
The speech patterns catch on. You can ask hard questions, but you have to ask them nicely. “Hey, girl! Is there any pilling on the sweater?” Sellers who make a lot of money have to walk a balance of being direct but sweet. “Sorry, babe, I have to stay firm on the price!” In her book Because Internet: Understanding New Rules of Language, linguist Gretchen McCulloch explains “polite typography,” which she says is a way of communicating online that involves “making extra effort, using initial capitals and friendly exclamation marks to signal cheerful distance or genuine enthusiasm.” On resale sites that are dominated by women, this language style is almost a dialect.
“It’s probably a women-dominated app,” says Elizabeth, a student at Texas A&M and a seller on Poshmark, explaining why she thinks users are so friendly. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t be nice—it’s not like a cutthroat industry.” In nearly two years on the app, she’s had barely a single bad interaction with a buyer. “They’ve been super nice, super understanding,” she says. “I don’t know why anyone would be super aggressive because that’s not really the vibe of the app.”
Elizabeth fits the profile of many an app-based reseller: She buys outfits for parties or events knowing she might not get a chance to wear them again. Reselling leaves her with a less cluttered closet and makes her clothing habit more affordable. It feels like a win-win for her and the buyer. Recently, she says, “I sold a Gucci belt for, like, $250—I wouldn’t have [listed] that for a hundred bucks, because the person wouldn’t have known if it was real. But I didn’t really want the Gucci belt, so I might as well give them a good deal.”
