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“How do you dress like an auction house?” seems like a faux-philosophical question posed by an insufferable “art guy” you might run into at a New York cocktail party. But it’s also a real question that was recently asked by two (very sufferable) individuals: Sotheby’s head of media Kristina O’Neill and Frame co-founder and creative director Erik Torstensson.
O’Neill, formerly the editor-in-chief of WSJ Magazine, joined the 281-year-old institution in 2024. One of her main responsibilities? “To think about how the Sotheby’s brand can connect with the broader cultural conversation,” she tells Vogue. “We’re encouraged to be very creative and out of the box in our thinking.” Brainstorming and “throwing spaghetti at the wall” culminated with the following idea: what if Sotheby’s had their own fashion collection? And if they did, what would that look like?
O’Neill remembered the launch Frame did with the Ritz Paris, where they translated the iconic hotel’s “Ritz Blue” aesthetic into sweaters, sweatshirts, and button downs. She rang up the brand’s founder, Torstensson. Could he do the same for Sotheby s?
A moodboard was born. Richard Gere. Harrison Ford. The Hamptons. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. And on June 4, an official Frame and Sotheby’s collaboration is born too.
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“We envisaged a world where the elegance of an Upper East Side drawing room met the preppy irreverence of the 1980s,” Torstensson tells Vogue of the offering, which include argyle sweaters, oxford button downs, cable-knit sweaters, pocket squares, and navy blazers with gavel motif linings. T-shirts and tote bags, meanwhile, are emblazoned with the word “collector.”
“High-fashion does heritage in a way that spans generations, from the seasoned uptown collector to the downtown nepo baby,” Torstensson adds.
If that all sounds a little ridiculous to you, that’s the point. Torstensson found himself fascinated with the “decadence and insouciance of that era in Manhattan,” where the yuppies and the HENRYs (high earners, not rich yet) worked out at the New York Sports Club so they could show off their abs in East Hampton; where the young buck brokers that inspired Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman drank at The Four Seasons and partied at Tunnel; where working girls like Tess McGill wore tweed jackets and shoulder-pad blazers to climb the corporate ladder.
And what do 1980s and art have in common, exactly? Well, that was the decade when the city’s upper crust finally started to buy it. In the ’70s, New York found itself on the brink of economic collapse. The ’80s is when they finally pulled themselves out of it. Suddenly, “greed is good” and “trickle-down economics” became the unofficial mantra of the 1%—for better or worse.
Plus, on a more surface level, formal style has always been the Sotheby’s way. “Sotheby’s lore says that back in the day the dress code was don’t wear anything to the office that you wouldn t wear to a wedding,” O’Neill says. “I think that signals how pulled together and polished our colleagues are historically.” (Don’t believe her? Two Sotheby’s employees, Kimberly Pirtle and Ashkan Baghestani, modeled in the campaign.)
Love it or hate it, yuppie style à la The Official Preppy Handbook is getting a lot of cultural airtime lately: shows like Sirens and The Perfect Couple have lampooned the look, whereas heritage brands such as St. John’s and Bally are seeing a resurgence. Maybe just draw the line at popping a collar.
Shop an edit of the collection, below.
