With everyone's brains fried from an insanely increased amount of screen time, spent on our phones and laptops indoors, the pursuit of escaping into wholesome, outdoor surroundings has never been more appealing.
Not many people would have placed their bets on the whole world becoming addicted to buying clothes online due to a global pandemic that's kept everyone at home for most of the year, but one outpost who has decided to go all in and commit to the reselling game is South London-based outerwear brand stockist OnBlack. The page's creator, Matt, started his love affair with clothes in between working jobs at Ladbrokes and Wetherspoons. Now, the page is fast building up a degree of pedigree alongside its ever-increasing archive of certified vintage pieces, from brands like Arc-teryx, Nike ACG, Prada and C.P. Company.
OnBlack has a story which will resonate with a lot of resellers currently in the rapidly-rising outerwear/lifestyle sphere in the UK. "I think it was 2014 when I first realised that I could make money doing something I actually enjoyed," Matt tells Complex via email. "After getting kicked out of college, I used money I made selling on Depop to save up, along with working bar jobs and at the bookies. I then started OnBlack properly in January 2019 after I had been made redundant from another job. At first, it was just to help keep me afloat while searching for a new job, while still having to cough up the mad rent money in London. It just escalated from there, really, and I've been doing this full-time for almost two years now."
The trend of technical outerwear infiltrating the current style zeitgeist and dominating IG moodboards is nothing new, but the pandemic has increased the interest in the "hikebeast" trend to new levels. More eyes are transfixed by pages like organiclab.zip's stories and unowned spaces' grid than ever before, with many pages like this now defining the current culutral wave—to the extent where we have seen the likes of Frank Ocean, Drake and Virgil Abloh don Arc'teryx jackets before the latter spliced them on the runway for an unofficial Off-White 'collaboration', to an incredibly mixed online reaction.
