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Luxury is in flux. This year, consumers questioned why luxury prices are continuing to skyrocket as quality seemingly dwindles. Creative directors shuffled from house to house. Fashion merged more than ever with industries from film to art. 2025 was, by all accounts, a major reset.
It’s with this in mind that founder Jesse Lee built the second edition of his luxury shopping platform Basic.Space’s IRL to URL sales fair, which brings the marketplace’s design, art and fashion offerings to a physical space for a limited, few-day run. Up the elevator at SoHo’s 575 Broadway — Prada occupies the ground floor — is where Basic.Space’s second fair will take place, from November 14, following its inaugural edition at Los Angeles’s Pacific Design Center in May.
On Thursday night, a mix of New York’s fashion, design and art crowd mixed in the space for the events’s opening night, lounging on the multi-thousand dollar sofas, steel benches and one blow up bean bag with martinis and margaritas in hand. Actor Danny Trejo, photographer Ellen Von Unwerth, artist Dustin Yellin and designer Heron Preston were in the mix. In one room, attendees played poker and blackjack in hopes of winning a $25,000 piece of art. Sales associates were at hand throughout the space.
The idea that young consumers are seeking out a more expansive version of luxury has been a consistent inspiration for Lee, who founded Basic.Space five years ago. In 2020, Basic.Space launched with vintage fashion, sourcing from Lee’s circle of well-heeled friends. “Whether it’s [Sporty Rich founder] Emily Oberg, [tennis player] Naomi Osaka or [DJ] Diplo, [tapping the wardrobes of influential figures] was the easiest way to get inventory,” Lee says. Since, the platform has evolved to sell design and furniture pieces, as well as art.
The Basic.Space universe has expanded, too. In 2023, Lee acquired Design Miami design fair, which runs parallel to Art Basel. And earlier this year, he acquired Platform, David Zwirner’s lower-priced gallery. Investors in Basic.Space include former Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri, Tao Capital, Tom Ford chair Domenico De Sole and former Louis Vuitton CEO Michael Burke.
“For us, [Basic.Space] was always about finding people that we think have good taste and then whatever they want to do, we help make that happen,” he says. This includes cross-industry collabs, with Lee recalling an early furniture tie-up between Virgil Abloh and Vitra. The New York event will feature collaborations between fashion designer Kris Van Assche and François Laffanour’s Galerie Downtown. A-Cold-Wall’s Samuel Ross is exhibiting furniture with Friedman Benda, via the former’s industrial design studio SR_A.
Basic.Space’s target audience is who luxury fashion brands covet: young and wealthy. “I’m the oldest millennial possible, so I’m older than [a lot of] them, but imagine late 20s, early 30s, you have a great career, you make enough money,” Lee says. (Or you inherited money.) “To be real in LA, there are a lot of nepo babies and all that stuff,” he adds dryly.
The common thread across these consumers? They’re young, they’re busy and they’re keen to spend. “The market we’re talking about is a very small subset, which is also why we don’t have a crazy big Instagram following,” Lee says. “But who we do have is this highly penetrated, super important cohort that in theory, every brand wants to be in front of because it is someone who has money, taste and aspirations to want to keep spending as they get older.”
What can brands learn from Basic.Space’s playbook to capture this consumer?
The new luxury
In recent years, luxury has taken on a new meaning. It’s no longer just an Hermès Birkin or a Togo sofa.
Since acquiring Design Miami, Basic.Space has begun to sell pricier furniture. But it’s not what bulks up the business. “It looks great from a positioning standpoint and there are a lot of cool things, but regardless of how rich or wealthy someone is, the last couple of years have been a soft market,” Lee says.
Prince sensitivity isn’t relegated to a certain income level, Lee says, adding that millennial and Gen Z consumers are smart. “People know how to bargain shop. It doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire — you want a deal,” he says. At founding, Lee had assumed that there would be enough people with money who wanted to buy “expensive, cool shit”. But in reality, shoppers want items that align with their day-to-day lifestyles, including not-extortionate hats and mugs.
To this end, over the last few months, Basic.Space has made an effort to introduce more (relatively) accessible pieces into its mix. “As much as people want six, seven-figure paintings, or a $50,000 sofa, sometimes you just need a $3,000 painting, a $1,500 drawing, maybe a $600 chair,” Lee says. “Curation doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be super expensive. We want things to be exclusive to us, but they could still be more affordable.”
Lee’s approach to membership is also informed by this changing nature of exclusivity. The platform has always been invite-only for sellers, and, earlier this year, it edged into member-only territory for buyers also. “You’ll see this this week: we want a lot of people to come, but also it’s the right people who are there with intent to purchase, because that’s how our sellers benefit.” It’s how Basic.Space benefits, too.
Membership is free, but Basic.Space has made it exclusive. The IRL events are technically invite-only. “We don’t sell tickets, it’s not open to the public — but we still promote it on Instagram,” Lee says. If someone wants to come, but isn’t yet a member, they need to register to be part of the Basic.Space community (those on the waitlist are then subject to the team’s approval).
It’s a happy medium, Lee says, in that it shifts the experience just far enough away from the old model, without straying away from exclusivity. “You go to a fair or a design showroom or an art gallery and you have to talk to all these people, and there’s gatekeeping happening,” he says. “We want to be able to dismantle that a little bit, but keep the scarcity and the exclusive experiences that get people interested in art and design to begin with.”
Los Angeles was a proof of concept, the founder says. Lee recalls attendees including Kendall Jenner and her friends coming back for multiple days. “It wasn’t a press thing, she [Jenner] didn’t have to show up with a bodyguard, because everybody that’s there shopping are friends of hers,” he says. Of course, not everyone shopping Basic.Space is actually a Jenner acquaintance — but it’s a group unlikely to go up and ask for a photo. “We were able to create this experiential but also intimate, casual shopping thing.”
It’s a win because many of Basic.Space’s attendees have money to spend, but limited time to spend it. (A problem fashion sourcer Gab Waller has also noted among the young consumers who use her services.) By bringing their interests — design, fashion, art — into one place, Basic.Space can get its consumer base into one space, too. Time is, after all, a valuable asset. “In my mind, what we’re doing is creating the new luxury — because the old luxury is more for our parents, baby boomers and Gen Xs,” Lee says. “We’re trying to set this up for the next 20, 30, 40 years.”
How people (want to) shop
Lee is under no illusion: young people shop online. But he doesn’t believe that’s all there is to it. Himself and his friends are his reference points. “What are we into? Design, fashion, art, right? OK, well how do we shop? It’s in-person, at cool events,” he says. “And then you want to have the convenience of being able to buy it on your phone, because the traditional way of buying design and art was always a bit antiquated.”
Since founding Basic.Space, Lee has made an effort to bridge IRL with URL (resulting in the current model). This dates back to 2020, when Basic.Space hosted a pop-up with Abloh in Miami’s Design District, timed to Design Miami (before Lee acquired the fair), which they live streamed. “Of course, 90% of the sales happened online, because most people couldn’t be in Miami during those events,” he acknowledges. But it was the in-person experience that drove the buzz — which is also what drove Lee to acquire Design Miami.
The ideal outcome from these IRL fairs is that attendees post them on socials, Lee says. In offering in-person opportunities to purchase, more consumers are likely to clock onto the platform and revisit to buy online, he says. The online end of Basic.Space is a For You-style homepage with AI-driven product recommendations, based on information Basic.Space has on the shopper. “We’re past that stage of investors and founders talking about e-commerce and tech and online-only. That was a specific moment, but in reality, we all want IRL to URL experiences that are seamless.”
The first URL to IRL event in LA was inspired by Barney’s Beverly Hills. He rolled out white carpets to lend a high-end department store feel. “I used to love going to Barney’s in Beverly Hills 10 years ago, where you could walk up and down this building and discover a mix of luxury brands and contemporary designers,” Lee says. “It was a whole thing you’d do on a Saturday, and I feel like that shopping experience on a weekend has just gone away over the last few years.”
In 2025, though, Lee believes that shorter is sweeter. There’s no going back to the Barney’s glory days. “People ask why we don’t open a shop. After just a couple of months, it loses its allure,” he says. The New York event will be three short days, but Lee promises a return next year. As for the future? 10 years is too far out to say, he adds, but in the next five, expect to see Basic.Space in more cities, from Seoul to Dubai.
“For better or for worse, the world is a smaller place with the internet and social media,” Lee says. In true Basic.Space fashion, Lee is using this fact to build physical experiences elsewhere.
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