/fa/ - Fashion

>>11353034
>>11352948
>>11353986
>>11354258
It seems clear to me the contention is just down to if Grailed should be understood as an impersonal market whose participants are primarily interested in exploiting arbitrage or as a personal exchange within a community whose participates are primiraly interested in advancing the hobby/art forward

That's why the distinction between Supreme and YY was drawn early on. For Supreme's resale market, it's obvious it falls under the former. But with archival pieces from avant-garde designers, the reseller 'market' has been historically seen as a community, not a market. Sellers like God coming in and treating it as business venture feels like he's exploiting the community's goodwill.

And really, he is: the opportunity for arbitrage exists only because of the community's mutual agreement to set prices at artificially low, making the pieces generally accessible; even if the means for sitting on rare pieces at huge upmarking will be available for many, the community never allowed that to be a sustainable option.

Of course, it's not like God just realized there was money lying on the table this whole time. It comes out of larger trends in fashion culture, ie streetwear mongoloids starting to 'graduate' to designerwear and dragging their hype culture with them and also a service like Grailed lowering the barrier to entry, and creating that gap with rakuten/y!j markets

It's similar to "vintage" resellers who professionally scavenge thrift stores to resell gems at upmarked prices. Casuals are willing to pay extra to save their time and effort, but at the expense of pushing out the initial thrifters who were the ones to establish the value of those pieces in the first place, out of critical and artistic - not commercial - intentions. It's easy to understand the capitalists here as parasites, subsuming an underground culture. But you can't blame them, it's the gentrifying poser faggots they're targeting who are really at fault.