It’s a freezing January night in New York. Writer Liana Satenstein is turning her apartment into something between a fashion show and a house party. Friends are walking through her cramped living room like it’s a catwalk. She’s calling out each outfit with the kind of energy you’d normally reserve for a stadium concert or a really good thrift find.
But here’s the thing — this isn’t some invite-only insider event. Anyone with internet can watch. Front row access for free. All you need is the live-shopping app Whatnot and a pulse.
This is “shoppertainment.” And it’s messy, weird, and kind of brilliant.
Shopping Was Never Supposed to Be This Sterile
Let’s be honest — shopping used to be fun. It was tactile. Social. You’d touch fabrics, try things on, talk to strangers about whether those jeans made your butt look good. There was theater in it.
Then e-commerce turned everything efficient. Clean. Cold. Click, buy, wait. Repeat. The humanity got sanitized right out of it.
Livestream shopping is clawing that energy back. It’s chaotic and unpolished and alive in a way that browsing a website at 2 a.m. will never be.
How a Closet Cleanout Became a Movement
Satenstein started her “Neverworns” series in person — literally inviting people over to dig through her closet and buy stuff she’d never worn. The kind of thing that feels intimate and slightly ridiculous. But people loved it.
Then her DMs exploded with people who couldn’t make it. So she went live. Took the whole circus online.
Suddenly she wasn’t just selling clothes. She was hosting a show. People weren’t just buying — they were hanging out. Chatting in real time. Bidding on pieces. Asking questions. Cracking jokes.
“It’s theater mixed with shopping mixed with just… talking,” she says. “The clothes matter, but so does everything around them.”
This Isn’t Your Parents’ QVC
Yeah, livestream shopping has QVC energy. But imagine QVC if it was run by someone who understood memes and didn’t take itself so seriously. If it felt less like an infomercial and more like watching your friend go through their wardrobe while you sit on FaceTime.
“Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t separate entertainment from community,” says Rebecca Rom-Frank, a strategist at WGSN. “So obviously shopping would become part of the content they consume.”
Whatnot, launched in 2019, has leaned hard into this. Users spend over 80 minutes a day on the platform. That’s longer than most people spend on Instagram or TikTok. And a lot of them aren’t even buying anything — they’re just there. Watching. Vibing. It’s like window shopping, but you’re lying in bed.
Real People, Real Bodies, Real Mess
Here’s what makes it work: it’s unfiltered.
Nina Chong-Jimenez runs a Whatnot store called Lockitin. She’s sold over 68,000 items. And yeah, she changes clothes on camera.
“People always ask how many bodysuits I own,” she laughs. “But they need to see how stuff actually fits on a real person. Not a model. Not perfect lighting. Just me, standing in my room.”
That’s the appeal. No airbrushing. No staged photoshoots. Just someone holding up a dress, spinning around, answering questions in real time. It’s scrappy. It’s honest. And in a world drowning in polished influencer content, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
It’s Alive — and That’s the Whole Point
Livestream shopping is still figuring itself out. Some nights are electric. Some are dead quiet. There’s no script, no guarantee. It’s unpredictable in the way most of the internet isn’t anymore.
Satenstein says she loves that. “There’s no formula. Sometimes it’s total chaos. Sometimes it’s magic. But it always feels alive.”
And maybe that’s what we’ve been missing. In a world of frictionless transactions and algorithm-fed recommendations, livestream shopping brings back the one thing that can’t be automated:
Actual human beings, talking to each other, in real time, about stuff that matters to them.
It’s not perfect. But it’s real. And right now, that counts for a lot.
