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, her and her best friend Chloë Sevigny would regularly sell their style castoffs out of a studio near St. Mark’s 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,” she says of the sales, which often descended into a word of mouth frenzy. “We’d have lines around the block.”
As Wollens’ 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 a fashion’s preeminent second hand 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 Alaïa skirt from Sevigny, a leather blazer from actress Julianne Moore, a Marc Jacobs shirt from Parker Posey and a Hysteric Glamor 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. The proceeds will go to We Do It Too, a Harlem youth charity.
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.
It’s not just The RealReal that’s seeing their closet sales trend. Heiress Ivy Getty threw a closet sale at Allison’s Archive this summer, where she sold Blumarine dresses and Bottega Veneta heels. In 2024, model Paloma Elsesser did one with stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. A few years ago, the former Vogue writer Liana Satenstein founded Neverworns—an Instagram live show where she cleans out fashion insiders’ closets and sells their clothes to eager shoppers in the comments section. It quickly caught on. Now, Satenstein regularly organizes sales for well-known industry figures like Lynn Yaeger, Sally Singer, and like Wollens, Sevigny herself. If the golden age of Hollywood was the 1950s, and the golden age of television in the 2000s, it seems the golden age of the closet sale is…right now.
People are certainly looking for bargains, Satenstein says, but she doesn’t think that tells the whole story. “People want connection when shopping. And what better way to have a connection then buy it from someone who you really like who has already worn it, and whose style you appreciate?” She also believes that the popularity of closet sales is a reaction against online shopping, which can feel oddly detached and impersonal. Going to a closet sale to flip through all the archival fashion, meanwhile, is…fun. “People just wanna do things,” Satenstein says, shrugging.
Second hand shopping used to be somewhat of a subdued, under-the-radar activity. You may have found that YSL skirt after sorting through a pile of stuff at the Brooklyn Flea Market, or quietly perused the crowded racks of the vintage stores of the Upper East Side. Now, as Wollens, Getty, Elsesser, and Satenstein show, consignment isn’t just a cheaper way to shop. It’s a cooler way to shop…and one that you can have bragging rights about.
It’s both a reaction against social media advertising and a reaction against the state of fashion itself. Clothes and accessories have gotten way more expensive: take a medium Chanel Classic Flap bag, which more than doubled in price from $4,900 in 2016 to $11,300 in 2025. This has led not only for many HENRY-type shoppers (high earners, not yet rich) to get priced out new purchases from brands they loved; now, their only option was to shop them at discounted means. “Price increases have reached a ceiling, and higher prices are negatively affecting demand from aspirational luxury consumers,” McKinsey published in their 2025 state of luxury report.
But price fatigue is hitting even the richest amongst us, who are frustrated that the same sweater they purchased pre-pandemic now costs hundreds of dollars more…even though the quality hasn’t changed and in some cases, even gotten worse. Add in growing uncertainty about Trump’s tariffs and their impact on consumer pricing—EU goods will be taxed up to 15 percent—and you have a lot of people who, frankly, are just sick of spending so much. Naiman even points out that it can be a point of embarrassment to admit you bought a designer good at these peak prices— “It used to be much more of a point of pride and now actually it’s the opposite. Like ‘Oh god, I paid a million dollars for this, but don’t tell anybody.’”
Plus, it feels like there’s not much they want to buy. “Why Can’t Fashion See What It Does to Women? ” read an October 10 headline in The New York Times, which dissected the clothes shown at Paris Fashion Week, many of which were utterly unwearable and, according to critic Vanessa Friedman, even “sometimes cruel.”
Closet sales, however? You’re wearing clothes that real, cool women have proven can actually be worn well in real-life. The algorithm could never.
The post An East Village It-Girl Curates a Closet Sale With Hand-Me-Downs From Julianne Moore and Chloë Sevigny appeared first on Vanity Fair.
