eBay was the real winner of the 2025 Met Gala, with vintage looks and pre-owned accessories featured on celebrities like Jay Pope and Chappell Roan.
At the 2025 Met Gala, eBay did not just make an appearance; it owned the spotlight. As the official livestream sponsor of the evening, the resale giant claimed more than just airtime. It became an emblem of a cultural pivot: one where vintage, resale, and archival fashion now hold as much cachet as couture. In a year defined by the Costume Institute’s exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” and a red carpet that paid homage to Black dandyism, eBay’s presence became a metaphor for fashion’s most compelling tensions: status versus sustainability, archive versus excess, and history as wardrobe.
eBay’s pre-owned fashion narrative took center stage, an unprecedented display of secondhand style on fashion’s most exclusive night. Celebrities not only wore vintage looks but shopped them from verified eBay sellers. Among the most buzzed-about: Chappell Roan’s custom suit — a glittered patchwork vision rendered in disco pink and capped with a feathered cape. The pieces were all sourced via eBay and brought to life under the guidance of Broadway costume designer Paul Tazewell. Emma Chamberlain’s pinstripe Courrèges mini, styled with mini oval glasses, elbow-length gloves, and court heels, was also a full vintage story. “I’ve been shopping vintage for years and to me it’s always been kind of a dream to wear vintage for my Met look and that’s never really worked out and this year it did,” Chamberlain said on TikTok.
Law Roach, who styled several stars, including Zendaya, for this year’s event, said he came with Burberry but noted all of his accessories were sourced on eBay. “I have this amazing Cartier piece, my brooches are Tiffany… eBay is such a place to find treasures.”
Actor Jeremy Pope wore a rare Maison Margiela FW97 vest that Law Roach styled with custom trousers tailored from eBay finds. Each of these choices not only nodded to the Black dandy aesthetic, with its intricate detail and hyper-attention to silhouette, but also to a growing reliance on resale to deliver that level of uniqueness.
Gen Z is driving much of this change, not just in how they shop, but in how they define luxury. The idea that vintage or secondhand could be aspirational used to be niche. Now it’s global. This alignment between prestige fashion and resale comes at a moment when economic policy is reshaping the retail landscape. The Trump administration’s tightening of the de minimis rule — closing a loophole that allowed fast-fashion players like Shein to ship goods duty-free to the U.S. — has disrupted supply chains. Tariffs on Chinese apparel imports have also reached as high as 145 percent. As new goods get more expensive, consumers are turning to secondhand.
According to Oakland-based resale marketplace ThredUp, it’s already seeing the impact. The platform reported a ten percent increase in first-quarter revenue, reaching $71.3 million, alongside a 95 percent spike in new users — the highest in its history. “If the price of new clothing goes up because of these tariffs, we believe this enhances the comparative value proposition for consumers who shop for used clothing on ThredUp,” CEO James Reinhart told analysts.
He further explained that the crackdown on de minimis shipments will have the “biggest impact by far,” forcing consumers and retailers alike to reconsider their dependence on fast fashion. Reinhart added that ThredUp’s new strategy to open-source its backend logistics and front-end technology was designed to remove the cost barriers that have made resale operations difficult for many fashion brands to scale. “We’ve decided to begin open sourcing our front-end technology and back-end logistics chain to encourage brands to make a bigger impact,” Reinhart said. “We’re excited to pioneer the next generation of branded retail, pairing free branded resale shops with cleanout programs that significantly reduce barriers to entry for brands and retailers.”
That strategy is already paying off. Gross margin for the company held near seventy-nine percent, and advertising costs decreased in April as competitors like Shein and Temu cut back on Meta and Google spending. In essence, secondhand is becoming more than a niche — it is becoming a solution.
For eBay — vintage is a driving force. In 2024, nearly 40 percent of all clothing, shoes, and accessories sold on the platform were pre-owned, a figure that speaks less to scarcity and more to shifting taste. According to WWD, the word “vintage” was searched more than 1,200 times per minute globally on eBay, as shoppers sought one-of-a-kind items with history and character rather than mass-produced sameness.
While many resale platforms compete for relevance, eBay continues to quietly dominate by scale. It reported a gross merchandise volume of $74.7 billion in 2024, with fashion playing an increasingly central role in that ecosystem. Annual revenue topped $10.3 billion, up slightly from the year prior, suggesting a steady demand for its uniquely broad marketplace of goods.
Part of that staying power lies in how eBay has positioned itself — not just as a peer-to-peer resale hub, but as a global archive. As interest in circular fashion rises alongside climate concerns and economic pressure, eBay’s role has expanded beyond convenience. Its authentication services, renewed focus on luxury and designer resale, and alignment with cultural events like the Met Gala have brought it firmly into the new fashion vernacular. And while most red carpets still prize newness, the 2025 Met Gala revealed a new model: one where the value lies not in novelty, but in fashion storytelling that’s as much about the past as it is about the future.
Related on Ethos:
