Just over a year ago, Gwyneth Paltrow was feeling restless. She had recently lost a storage unit full of her belongings in a fire, she’d sold her Los Angeles house, and now she was preparing to move.
“I was sitting with one of my great old friends, Rashida Jones, and I said to her, ‘I have all this great stuff that doesn’t go anywhere. I wish I could just have a huge garage sale,’” Paltrow tells Vogue. “‘Well, why don’t you call this place Julien’s?’” Jones suggested. “I was like, Is that totally random?” Paltrow says, laughing.
In the end, Paltrow took her friend’s advice, enlisting the auction house to help her find new homes for some of her pieces—drawn from the ’90s Oscar trail up through her Goop days—with proceeds from the sale going to World Central Kitchen. The NGO’s mission to provide fresh meals to people in disaster zones is a cause Paltrow holds dear. “I express love through food. I think my dad taught me that. One of the many ways he expressed his love towards my brother and me was cooking us meals,” she says. “José Andrés is an old friend of mine, and I just admire that mission so much. It’s such an immediate way to show care, love, nourishment, dignity—and it’s apolitical. I wish there were more people in the world like him who put their money where their mouth was in that way and showed up.”
When the time came to decide what was going off to Julien’s, Paltrow found certain things surprisingly difficult to part with. “There was a Baby Taylor guitar that Tim McGraw and I had made for the whole cast and crew when we finished Country Strong,” she says. “I was like, oh, this is sad to go, but someone’s going to be more excited about having this than I am.”
She looked for pieces that felt emblematic of different phases of her life and career. Among the items up for auction are Ralph Lauren’s sketches of the iconic bubblegum-pink dress Paltrow wore to the 1999 Oscars, where she won for Shakespeare in Love; and a John Galliano–era Dior dress (worn on the runway by Gisele Bündchen) that she donned for the LVMH Tower opening that same year. The ombré Atelier Versace evening gown she wore to the 2010 Country Music Awards represents her musical era, she says, citing Glee and Country Strong. And Marvel fans may recognize the custom silver Armani short suit she wore to the Iron Man 2 premiere.
“The thing that really appealed to me about it is that I think things have energy,” Paltrow says. “It’s nice for those things to live on. It’s nice for things to accrue value through different provenances and different owners.”
A bit of backstory you won’t find in the Julien’s catalog? Paltrow points to a gray Atelier Versace tunic and cropped pants, which she wore to the 28th Annual Vision Awards in 2001. “I wore that also to the Clinton White House for—God, for something,” she says. “I have a picture of me in that outfit holding a cigarette outside at the White House.”
Paltrow’s belongings will be auctioned at the Peninsula Beverly Hills and online on March 24 and 25, 2026.
