While it’s impossible to pinpoint the originator of the closet sale—the fashion industry term for when a well-known fashion figure holds an in-person event to sell their used clothes—you can, at the very least, say that Haley Wollens was one of its earliest adapters. As a teen in the 2000s she used sell her old stuff on the streets of the East Village for a few dollars. Years later, she and her best friend, Chloë Sevigny, would regularly sell their style castoffs out of a studio near St. Marks Place to friends, family, and, well, anyone who managed to get their hands on the address, which many were desperate to do: Wollens, then an emerging stylist, and Sevigny, the unofficial It girl of downtown Manhattan, were known for their impeccable and avant-garde taste. These sales were a way not just to buy discounted clothes, but to buy their inevitable New York style: “It became sort of notorious,” Wollens says of the sales, which often descended into a word-of-mouth frenzy. “We’d have lines around the block.”
As Wollens’s career took off—she’s styled everyone from Sevigny to Miley Cyrus to Drake and is currently the editor in chief of online fashion and art publication Myth—her days as fashion’s preeminent secondhand reseller dwindled. Yet this October she’s finally ready to once again dust off her and her friends’ shelves.
On Wednesday at The RealReal’s SoHo flagship and online, Wollens and Myth will debut the celebrity closet sale to end all closet sales. There’s Maison Margiela boots, a Comme des Garçons blouse, and an Alaïa skirt from Sevigny; a leather blazer from actor Julianne Moore; a Marc Jacobs shirt from Parker Posey; and a Hysteric Glamour dress from Rowan Blanchard. Patti Wilson donated a Philip Treacy baseball hat, whereas fashion editor Mel Ottenberg is offering up a black Valentino tote bag. Designer Maryam Nassir Zadeh, meanwhile, gave Miu Miu heels and a Dries Van Noten dress. As part of the sale, The RealReal will donate $25,000 to Take Care of Harlem, which will use the funds to support Harlem youth charity We Do It Too.
Kristen Naiman, chief brand officer of The RealReal, approached Wollens with the idea after becoming a fan of the adventurous style she put forth in Myth. The consignment company started doing closet sales a few years ago, offering one-off items once owned by people like Kate Moss and Natasha Lyonne. They sold out almost instantly. “The transaction is: You like that person’s style, so you shop in their closet because it’s a shortcut to mirroring what their style looks like,” she says of the reason behind explosive popularity of their closet sales.
Yet, Naiman says, it also goes a little deeper than that. We live in an age where clothing options feel limitless. But not always in a good way: We’re constantly served ads for products we don’t need on social media feeds, then those same feeds cause those items to hyper-trend, rendering them “out of style” months after purchase. In this age of algorithmic overconsumption, a curation like Wollens’s has never held higher value. “One of the things about resale is that I think it feels aligned with how people feel right now. The uniqueness, the personal style, the ability to actually have an antidote to the algorithm,” says Naiman.
Elise Taylor
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