We love the chase!” Kerry Taylor, founder of Kerry Taylor Auctions, is crowing about acquiring a 17th-century gentleman’s ruff, but she’s equally excited about a 1960s Rudi Gernreich Kite dress that is about to go on the block.
For the past four decades, the London-based Taylor has been a one-woman vintage whirlwind. After joining Sotheby’s in 1980, fresh out of art college, she spent the next 23 years there before striking out on her own—and the history of her business could serve as a primer to the rise in desirability, value, and prices of collectible fashion.
It wasn’t always thus. “It never used to make any money,” she says, laughing. But how things have changed: An iconic Saint Laurent Mondrian dress from 1965 sold in one of Taylor’s early auctions for a mere 2,000 pounds, but by 2011 the price had zoomed to 27,000 pounds—and who knows what it would realize today?
On the day we speak, Taylor is prepping for an auction titled “Martin Margiela, the Early Years: 1988–94.” (A gray tailleur with an astonishing deconstructed sleeve will sell for over 101,000 euros, a world record for Margiela.) Soon, though, she will open in the New York metropolitan area at the Mana Contemporary arts center in Jersey City. “Will people come to Jersey?” she asks uncertainly. Yes, I assure her: Vintage clothing aficionados would slog through waist-deep mud to see, say, a velvet Poiret opera coat or a Westwood-McLaren Seditionaries T-shirt.
For her first stateside auction, taking place in May, Taylor has tapped the collection of the late Peggy Moffitt, renowned for her role as model and muse to the revolutionary designer Rudi Gernreich. “We thought, What would be better than to have a one hundred percent American auction?” Taylor says. (The collection’s provenance is impeccable: Moffitt’s son, Christopher Claxton, is the consignor.)
Moffitt was famous for her raccoon-ringed eyes and her stark Vidal Sassoon coiffure and for the daring way she sported Gernreich’s transgressive fashions. (Gernreich was not just a trailblazer as a designer, but incredibly brave as well: He was one of the founders of the Mattachine Society, an early gay-rights organization, way back in 1950.) She was also deeply loyal to Gernreich’s aesthetic legacy. “She basically kept the look,” Taylor says, “even into her old age.” In 2003, Moffitt collaborated with Rei Kawakubo on a series of Gernreich pieces re-created under the Comme des Garçons label, and these are also in the sale, along with hundreds of other items, including Gernreich’s norm-shattering monokini, a legendary one-piece topless swimsuit.
Some of the outsize prices she commands are the result of bidding wars between museums, who want to sequester their fragile acquisitions under glass, and deep-pocketed individuals, who intend to blithely wear these things. It is old news by now that more and more celebrities have embraced vintage—that pale lemon Empire waist number that Ariana Grande wore at the Golden Globes, for example, was an original from Givenchy’s spring 1966 couture.
Through Taylor’s hands have passed exquisite garments from the closets of everyone from Audrey Hepburn to Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne Guinness to Isabella Blow, Geri Halliwell to Kate Middleton. (The Princess of Wales’s saucy semisheer slip dress achieved 65,000 pounds.) When a black crepe 1920s evening gown crossed her desk, unceremoniously rolled up in a plastic bag, Taylor realized at once—even absent a label—that it hailed from the house of Madeleine Vionnet. (It sold for 50,000 pounds.)
“A Chanel coat from 1917 might reach 70,000 pounds,” she explains. The highest price ever realized at one of her events was a staggering 377,000 euros for a 1999 Jean Paul Gaultier couture dress in blue denim (denim!)—replete with an ostrich-feather train by Lemarie—from the collection of the socialite Mouna Ayoub.
Even far newer pieces, though, can grab you by the throat. Taylor tells the story of a client who was wondering if she should order something from John Galliano’s masterful final couture show for Margiela in 2024. “She asked me, ‘Will it hold value?’ I told her, ‘Yes, buy one!’ ” The woman settled on a dazzling black dress with silver beading that was shown on the runway with a prosthetic posterior—something to wear now and perhaps consign later.
“Even without that fake butt,” Taylor says, smiling, “she looked fabulous.”
