You can finally buy Charli xcx's tour clothes Vinted's winning strategy is sponsoring the pop star's world tour and putting her wardrobe up for sale

Among the news of recent days (daylight saving time, Willy Chavarria's candles, the collapse of Labubu sales, and the Pope going to vote), the most exciting is the collaboration between Vinted and singer Charli xcx. The company revealed that for the Music, Fashion, Film tour (sponsored by the platform), the British singer will wear only secondhand total looks. The news made the rounds online and was met with universal approval because, indeed, it is one of the most well-matched collaborations in recent years.

But let's understand why together.

An outfit repeater against the outfit rememberers

«Charli is known for her fun, accessible and distinctive personal style, as well as her ability to shape culture», said Jessie de la Merced, Vinted's Vice President of Corporate Affairs, in an interview with WWD. Accompanied by her long-standing stylist Chris Horan, Charli xcx has thus incorporated pieces purchased on Vinted into her tour wardrobe, a natural extension of her own outfit repeater attitude.

In less enlightened times, fashion would have been allergic to the idea of wearing a look more than once — an unwritten rule that creates endless headaches for stylists and conveys the idea of a decidedly unsustainable fashion. But ever since the release of the album brat, Charli xcx has been proclaimed an indie fashion icon, with everything that label entails.

She can smoke on her wedding day, perform on the most coveted stages in torn t-shirts, and count herself among the outsiders while always looking cool. She can also wear the same dress twice, in defiance of the stage diva and party-girl persona, without shocking the masses. «I feel so lucky to be able to work with these designers on these incredible pieces, so I'm going to wear them all the time», the singer herself has admitted. And indeed, the wedding dress designed for her by Danielle Frankel was deconstructed and repurposed for multiple uses, while the Saint Laurent dress worn to the wedding after-party had already been worn by the star on the Paris stage.

The circular approach of Charli xcx and her stylist

For the world tour, Chris Horan used the keywords «distressed», «gothic» and «flounce» to find online an early 2000s dress by Christian Audigier and the grey semi-transparent blouse that Charli wore in San Diego. The source of the Roberto Cavalli dress (Fall Winter 2005 collection) worn at the first Airbnb gala in Los Angeles remains unclear, but the singer's interest in vintage fashion and the circular approach does not.

The collaboration with Vinted is, however, reciprocal: starting November 16, Charli will open the doors of her own wardrobe, giving her fans in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia the opportunity to purchase a selection from her personal archive (a preview of which is already available on the singer's Vinted account). The proceeds from the sales will go to Rainbow Railroad, an organisation supporting the LGBTQIA+ community.

From Skins to Soho, girls want to express themselves

The reason the collaboration between Charli xcx and Vinted is particularly well-matched, beyond the singer's inclination toward the secondhand fashion market, lies in the mood. Charli XCX is the spiritual daughter of Effy Stonem, the protagonist of the British television series Skins: a British girl with a sexy look, smudged makeup, dishevelled hair, and a cigarette perpetually between her fingers. But more than her miniskirts and ever-torn fishnet stockings, Effy Stonem embodies the indie lifestyle that celebrates disorder and excess, free from the pretentiousness of today's digital culture and any sense of danger.

The girls of Skins head to flea markets at dawn, after wandering the city all night in the wake of some wild party, expressing their character through garish colours, skin-tight trousers, and sky-high heels. That aesthetic has already made a comeback over the past few years, resurrecting the trends of wired headphones, photographs taken with the blinding flash of digital cameras, the return of cigarettes, and tramp stamp tattoos.

Has reuse finally become cool?

The Effy-Stonem-esque aesthetic fills social media, with girls posting short videos in the suburbs of London or New York, thrifting fur-trimmed stiletto boots and designer maxi bags. It celebrates an aesthetic — apparently — off the radar of mainstream fashion, fast fashion, and the flattening of personality: «go big or go home» is this generation's motto. Beyond the prices (judged at various turns to be either too high or too low), what is being rewarded in Charli xcx's collaboration with Vinted is authenticity.

Because the real news is not that Charli xcx wears secondhand clothes, but that nobody finds it strange. In an industry that has built its mythology on the unrepeatable nature of a look and an obsession with the new, seeing a global pop star take the stage in a piece sourced online promotes the normalisation of reuse. The collaboration with Vinted works because it doesn't ask Charli to play a role: it simply gives a name and a platform to what she has always done.

There remains, of course, the paradox of a company celebrating conscious consumption by leveraging a world tour and an icon with millions of followers. But if an entire generation begins to see a pre-loved garment as an expression of personality rather than a fallback option, then the unwritten rule of the never-repeated outfit might truly start to crack. And, judging by the enthusiasm with which the news was received, perhaps it already has.