“I have a shopping problem for sure,” Ivy Getty says from her New York City apartment, as her two rescue chihuahuas Martini and Blue Naomi climb onto her lap. “There could be worse problems! But it’s a thing. My grandma tried to make me go to Shopaholics Anonymous.”
Getty never did. And—with all respect to her grandmother, fashion icon Ann Getty—we’re all the better for it: This weekend, the heiress will hold a closet sale at Allison’s Archive, a vintage clothing showroom run by Allison Dickerman. Prices range from under $10 for a pair of fuzzy Rihanna x Fenty Puma slippers to $650 for evening gowns.
All proceeds will go to Remake, a nonprofit that addresses exploited female workers in the fast-fashion industry. She hopes to piggy back off of Chloë Sevigny, who held a similar event that went viral last year, and make eco-and-price friendly closet sales a thing: “I love the idea of popularizing vintage and buying used pieces or pieces secondhand.”
There will be John Galliano, who designed Getty’s wedding dress. There will be Giambattista Valli, whose couture shows Getty is a front-row fixture at. There will be buckets filled with Bottega Veneta high heels. (Getty’s finally accepted she’s a kitten heel person.) And there will be plenty of Blumarine—the designer that best literally and figuratively fits Getty’s bohemian–meets–Uptown Girl personality. (Fun fact: She actually owns the original sparkly dress worn by Brittany Murphy’s Molly Gun in the film. She’s keeping that one though.) In fact, a piece from the famed early aughts designer is Dickerman’s personal favorite. “We discovered that Ivy has shoes to match a Spring 2000 Blumarine skirt we have at the showroom.”
There’s also just tons and tons of traditional vintage, including pieces from Emilio Pucci. Getty’s an avid collector with a bad—or good, depending on how you look at it—habit for buying rare items even if they won’t fit her. “I have a lot of things that are just not my size, or that I bought because I can appreciate what their value is,” she says. “ I think that I’m not going to see it available again—but I end up not wearing it.”
“I just want them to have a life,” she adds.
Getty says the sale was fate and that she’s been thinking about it for a while. So once her closets were overflowing, she knew it was time. She also wanted to make room for the vintage collection left to her by her late father John, who passed away in 2020. But after her recent divorce, she began focusing intensely on her own health: eating healthy, seeing a healer, meditating, and so on. (But not working out. “I don’t work out,” she says, laughing.) The one day she checked her Instagram and Dickerman was in her D.M.s: Would she ever want to do a sale?
“I don’t know what in the spirituality is happening to me right now,” she says. “ I was like, Oh my god, spring cleaning, that’s such a term. What are the odds that this happened in the spring?” She says. “It just feels lucky. This was great timing.”
An online sale would have been way easier. But there was never a question about the sale being in-person: “I want to see where these pieces go! I’m a little bit of a hoarder—I’m protective of my items. It’s hard to have them disappear,” she says. “It s like children or something! Okay, not children, but I just need to know where it’s going.” She’s also just down to meet other people who like, well, the same stuff she does.
I mean—whoever ends up buying her green beaded 1930s silk playsuit mini dress sounds like a fun person to hang out with.
Allison’s Archive is located at 248 McKibbin Street in Brooklyn, New York.
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