Here’s Every Single Item You’re Going to Buy On Depop This Winter

Depop, for those who aren’t familiar, is primarily an app used to sell items or to browse items for sale. An "online shop", if you will, which is similar to Instagram in the way it looks and feels, but with a dangerously tempting "Buy" button underneath every picture – and thus with the added option of wasting £15 in as many seconds on an over-washed Reebok T-shirt that a 15-year-old hypebeast in Norwich neglected to photograph the moth-hole on the back of.

Listen, you know what Depop is: you, like me, also know that the ratio of fantastic and regularly worn items you have bought over the years versus awful shit that has long since been thrown in the bin is around 1:10; you thought it would make you trendy, and instead it just made you poor. Such is the double-edged sword of the UK's most popular sweater-buying app.

Here's all the shit you're going to impulsively buy on it next month while half-watching TV with your mum:

A Fun Game: idly type the word "jeans" into the Depop search bar and scroll and scroll and scroll, going deep past "jeans you normally buy", through "jeans in a fun new cut you might consider getting", and then bottoming out with stumbling upon "the very jeans that will define you as a person, become an integral part of your wardrobe and by extension your psyche itself".

To do this you will be overwhelmed by a frankly alarming amount of jeggings: elasticated faux-denim plagues Depop, hordes and hordes of once-black-but-now-grey size 10 skinny jeans, pathetic and useless, baggy at the knees from being worn every single day for a year. These are now being sold for £7 by Laura from Gloucestershire, who will absolutely not send them if you click "buy", owing to the fact that she put them up for sale two months ago and has long since deleted the app to make room for all the Snapchat stories she's saved on her phone. You might consider opening a PayPal dispute over this blatant fraud for a few brief moments, but you will inevitably be distracted by someone burning a steak on the episode of Come Dine With Me you’re watching and the £7 will be lost forever in the eternal void of internet money.

How many people has she sold these jeans too? How many more victims will there be?

Attempting to find trainers on Depop is a relatively risky tightrope to walk: you lurch between "genuine BNIB bargains" and "inexplicable £300-at-resale plain white trainers", financial ruin awaiting you. This, if you search deep enough, is where Depop comes into its own: there is constantly a selection of objectively nice trainers, worn a mere few times, year-before-last Christmas present Air Max, still in their box and – joy unbounded – in your exact size! Treat yourself! Maybe these fresh new kicks will fill the hollow void in your soul that you’ve noticed has been growing slowly but exponentially for a good couple of months, ever since you had that jarring ketamine-fuelled week of consecutive one-night-stands! Close your eyes and imagine yourself wearing these trainers! The jokes you’ll make! The people you’ll impress! The fashion bloggers that will stop abruptly in the street to ask to take your photograph! We will refer to this nice wholesome collection of trainers as The Clean Side.

For every clean and unworn trainer on Depop there is, sadly, a filthy and very worn trainer, giving off a deeply ominous vibe despite optimistically being listed as "wavy". These trainers belong to The Dirty Side – a disgusting pair of charity shop Gazelles that have seen at least eight pairs of feet in their lifespan, including someone who was apparently a very sloppy housepainter, or some Vans that one of those Lads Who Is Too Into Gigs has tactically pre-ruined for you.

Sad thing is, you find yourself gazing at a pair of these ­– shelltoe Originals for under £30? You could fix that sole with a little white paint and glue, right? – knowing that you’re putting 90 percent mark-up in the form of weed money right in the pocket of that strange tall boy who got held back in your sixth form.

Girls searching for a new Going Out Top is surely the most common activity this app sees, and with relative degrees of success, owing to the nature of the thing. Buying a hand-made or second-hand top significantly reduces the chances of seeing someone else stumbling out of a toilet cubicle wearing the same thing as you, and also minimises those dark thoughts of, 'Ah: I see you hit the Urban Outfitters sale, too.'

Thing is, it's normally the same shit, just shifted onto a different timeline. Have a little scroll on Tuesday searching for Saturday's outfit – perhaps search "Y2K" if you're feeling extra trendy ­– and the majority of results will be disappointing. Hundreds of variations of a plain white camisole top with a diamanté butterfly embroidered onto one boob, found in the wardrobe of a girl who's been too greedy with ASOS's buy-now-pay-later option and now owes them £289, so is desperately trying to rebrand everything she owns as vintage-chic on her Depop shop and is selling this objectively hideous top from New Look’s 2005 Spring/Summer collection for a very ambitious £15. And then you fucking see someone out wearing the same one anyway. Pointless.

You absolutely will buy one of these sweatshirts at some point, thinking you’ve found the very item that will seamlessly tie together all of your outfits – the perfect shade of faded cream, a subtle but visible logo, perfection in its warmest form, £4.99 for postage is nothing. Until it arrives two weeks later, you excitedly try it on and instantly despise it. The neckline is huge, gaping. It’s awkwardly tight around your shoulders, yet even more awkwardly baggy around your stomach. Hang on, is it— is it cropped? Is it supposed to be this short? Surely there’s not supposed to be an inch of midriff between the bottom of this sweatshirt and your jeans? This is not in the slightest how it looked on the waif-like makeshift model in the little square picture. Set fire to it. Burn it instantly in a giant bonfire of disgust and regret. Congratulations, you just got scammed out of £40 by a 17-year-old.

For a light-hearted analysis of a relatively harmless e-commerce app, I feel like this article could maybe be taking on a slightly bitter tone? Almost reads as though I myself have had some negative experiences using it and am writing as a form of catharsis? Weird. Anyway: once, I found some lovely handmade earrings on Depop and bought them for the bargain price of about £4, little pink pom-poms sewn onto an earring (remember the joyous but fleeting week circa mid-2017 when those were a thing?), and they arrived a day early in a little pink parcel. There are a lot of pages like this, personalised bead necklaces made and sold by someone’s aunt who surely is making a maximum of 20p profit when you count labour costs and the fee Depop takes off every sale into consideration. I never wear them, but may these wholesome e-shops live on forever.

Hang on, though, because you're scrolling through the tops here, and yes they are expensive – far, far out of your price range – but it’s nearly December now. You want one of those stripy tops that says Guess on it. You want to stroll around Tesco looking like A$AP himself. What harm could it do to give mum a quick ring, mention that you saw this T-shirt on this shopping app, it’s actually really good value, it’s not even new, it’s a complete bargain, plant the Christmas present seed into her mind? What evil is there in forwarding the link to her and very patiently explaining how she sets up a PayPal?

Then, when the big day comes and she, for some reason, gives you a metal detector, you take a few minutes to reflect on whether your life really is, on the whole, any better than that of a hypebeast, or if it's actually quite a lot worse. They may be materialistic and have taught themselves complicated tactics so they don't ever have to pee while waiting in line outside Supreme for 14 hours, but you don't even have anything to wear on Christmas Day apart from dad's old fleecy hiking jumper. Who’s the real winner here? It’s not you. It’s definitely not you.

@dankmemes4homecountiesteens