Some eBay sellers bare their souls, like a woman who went on a shopping spree when her marriage was on the rocks. “The husband was just starting to roam, things were going south very quickly, so now I had 6 pairs of leather jeans,” she wrote.
According to blogger and curator Emily Spivack, although eBay is “not meant to be a social networking platform,” many sellers can’t resist telling tales about the clothes they’re auctioning off. Spivack began buying some of these clothes, from a “purportedly blood-stained, Civil War–era shirt” to a Coach purse offered up in lieu of a bar tab, and will exhibit them alongside their origin stories at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in May.
The project is a surprising combination of humans’ visuality with our deep reliance on narrative: we love hearing that those “hot pink, Versace jeans” are a regift from one of Jessica Simpson’s backup dancers as much as the seller loves telling us.
