A fashion anthropologist on eBay: Locating, bidding, collecting and ethnographically wearing second-hand menswear

I have had a long love affair with the online auction website eBay. However, whilst conducting research with bespoke tailors in London and a network of Instagram sartorialists, this love grew into an obsession. Throughout this period of research I amassed a collection of mostly British menswear that resulted from this work, but which frequently languished in wardrobes, unloved and unseen. More recently I have returned to this collection to re-examine it, not merely as the consequence of research, but as a fertile resource in its own right. This article engages with a collection of garments from Joshua Kane, Paul Smith, Alexander McQueen, Anderson and Sheppard, Mark Powell and A Child of the Jago, among others, but primarily examines a process. This ranges from the routine of bidding for specific articles of clothing on online auction sites, to the process by which a collection is subsequently amassed, neglected and rediscovered. By considering the purchasing, collecting and ethnographic wearing of these items as part of a multi-stranded methodological toolkit, questions will be asked as to the role of acquiring and living with garments as a means of understanding them.