We Need Better Live Shopping Experiences, a recent newsletter by Liana Satenstein opines from my inbox. Satenstein, a fashion journalist turned secondhand style maven, has more than earned the authority to make this statement. Neverworns, her online talk show about neglected clothes, was originally conceived as an Instagram Live series in 2020 and has become a modest empire in the half decade proceeding. Evolving into a run of rarefied closet sales, it allows thousands of would-be customers to shop the wardrobes of fashion insiders like Lynn Jaeger, Chloë Sevigny and Sally Singer. Since then, Satenstein has taken on a team of employees and moved Neverworns from Instagram to its current residence behind a paywall on Substack.

The booming popularity of closet sales has been characterised as a rise in ‘narrative-driven’ shopping, where provenance can supersede most other considerations. That vintagewear is both exploding as an industry and a limited commodity by nature has exacerbated the situation, not to mention the increasing pursuit of quality as a taste signifier in the era of fast fashion. It’s a trend that is currently dovetailing with another bullish market phenomenon: the rise of livestream shopping.

For Satenstein, closet sales led to livestream success. “I did [Neverworns] with a vintage dealer out in LA who has a lot of Vivienne Westwood and very rare collectibles,” Satenstein says of one of her earliest episodes. “He ended up selling a McQueen helmet through the show, and at that point I didn’t even have the intention of selling anything. That kind of flipped a switch for me.”

In China (where this retail format first originated in 2016) the live commerce industry has rapidly expanded into a major sales channel that accounts for upwards of $700 billion annually, primarily through platforms like Taobao Live, Kuaishou and Douyin. In Thai and Indonesian markets, live sales now represent between 15 and 20 per cent of all e-commerce; outside of China, the industry is estimated to grow to $2 trillion by 2030, with the US and Europe predicted to account for $1.2 trillion of that total.

As a result, specialised shopping platforms have emerged to tap the Western market. While the American industry may have annointed Whatnot as their live auction app of choice, the Brits – especially players in the designer vintage space who began on apps like Depop – seem to have pledged allegiance to Tilt. With an $18 million funding round behind it, this year the start-up recruited a number of sellers with established audiences on Instagram, paying them a monthly promotional fee as well as subsidising sales streams with discounts, vouchers and giveaways.

Both Whatnot and Tilt emulate the vertical content style popularised by TikTok – but Tilt is hyper-focused on targeting Gen Z consumers and keeping them there. “[Gen Z are] very used to these unique apps and experiences from online gaming and watching Twitch streams,” co-founder Abhi Thanendran told TechCrunch in 2024. The in-app giveaways, for instance, serve a dual purpose: incentivising you to pay attention to the stream in the first place, and keeping you there until the winner’s announcement near its end.

When you first join Tilt you get a bit trigger-happy. I bought six or seven things in a week – Sophie Polizzi

For customers, these auctions are more of a sprint than a marathon. Your bank details are already loaded into the app – all you need to commit to a purchase is a single swipe. Each round of bidding lasts for around ten seconds, the timer only resetting if a new top bidder establishes themselves. When bidding wars break out, it can be hard to look away. I remember an especially ferocious one over a three-way Diesel top lined with large silver rivets that could be worn as a long sleeve, strapless or a bandeau. The fight ended at around £500; the winner embraced their pyrrhic victory in the chat with a single crying face emoji.

“When you first join Tilt you get a bit trigger-happy,” says Sophie Polizzi, who runs the Bristol-based online resale shop Valula Vintage. “I bought six or seven things in a week when they were running discounts over summer.” She realised she had mostly been acting on impulse, “seeing things and feeling like you needed them when you really didn’t.” Polizzi recently decided to stop hosting streams on the app too, finding it an unreliable source of revenue. She also felt excluded from the company’s influencer marketing push, particularly as she had been among Tilt’s first users. “It felt like other sellers were making a lot of money, but I wasn’t getting paid anything. I just started to think I was spending all this effort to get people to use their app, when really I should have been using that time to make content for my own website.”

Isabella Vrana, a vintage reseller who first dipped a toe into the industry as a UCL student, says that the live retail format has completely changed her workflow for the better. “Listing on Depop is quite labor intensive,” she explains. “Let’s say you want to sell 50 things: you have to shoot 50 looks, create 50 listings then message all potential customers. You also have to be very responsive, and all of that is done before you even make the sale.”

Unlike Polizzi, Vrana is paid a monthly promotional fee by Tilt. She also works with a buyer to source her stock, and she shares a brick-and-mortar shopfront with Vival Studios on Hackney Road in London. When it opened about two years ago, Vrana saw it as a means of moving away from Depop, where Vogue had dubbed her the “undisputed champion”. But she couldn’t quite escape the demand she had created. “I had so many loyal international customers who couldn’t come to my store messaging me.” Vrana had been looking for a new way to sell online after the COVID sales boom when live commerce apps started reaching out to her. That Tilt was exclusively dedicated to selling fashion was appealing. “The main reason that I do all of this is because I’m obsessed with clothes,” she says.

In terms of what people tend to buy on the app, designer name recognition is a key factor for all three sellers – an esoteric, Y2K bent to the clothes never hurts either. At the moment, Vrana’s hottest-selling stock are pairs of Levi’s Engineered Jeans, a twisted denim trouser with an adjustable back buckle that originated in 1999; this past April, Satenstein dedicated an entire stream to the Michael Kors-era Céline Boogie bag, having acquired seven different styles of the 2002 purse.

Vrana and Polizzi built their businesses with an emphasis on search engine-optimised name brands. Polizzi frequented vintage markets in Tuscany and Bologna to procure zany deadstock pieces from Florentine designer duo Save The Queen! and Parisian cult-brand Cop.Copine. Vrana sought out luxury labels like Moschino and Versace. Since Satenstein was already connected to big names in the larger world of fashion media, she was able to directly parlay her Vogue readership into a paying customer base who adore her QVC-style antics. “I’ve always felt that the sales I was doing felt like concerts,” says Satenstein, who wears a befitting black headset when hosting.

I think people really want an experience with their clothes. They want that sentimental factor back – Liana Satenstein

In a recent interview, Satenstein likened online shopping to the “easy gratification” of online pornography while characterising in-person sales as more “thoughtful”, romantic sex where “you’re touching”. Is the livestream somewhere in between? “I’m not a pornography watcher,” she says, “but I can imagine that there’s a similar vacant feeling. I think people really want an experience with their clothes. They want that sentimental factor back.”

Live commerce platforms have more than succeeded in marketing themselves as exercises in community-building, but while there is often a sense of camaraderie in the chats (and a parasocial element to tuning in to watch the same people stream regularly) they also undeniably foster competition between consumers, which in turn encourages price inflation. One of the main reasons streaming works so well as a commercial medium is because the interactivity enhances consumer trust and increases user engagement, but these benefits tend to only go one way – rewarding community leaders rather than the communities themselves.

What we get in return often isn’t as straightforward, or easy to explain. But what live commerce truly seems to offer us is access to curated style and, by extension, affirmation of our own good taste. Stop shopping like a normie, reads a string of promotional text on Tilt’s web browser page. Searching for products is cringe. This is the future, where you can compulsively shop the recently archived past to establish a sense of identity in a shifting, uncertain present. At the very least, these platforms are a place to go on weekday evenings, a virtual third space rife with ample opportunities and vintage Cavalli. As Camus imagines Sisyphus happy, so too do I imagine @matchaluvr_98 is pleased with their £350 Levi’s. They are a good find, after all.