As I join a video call with Johnny Valencia, the founder of Pechuga Vintage, I notice his attention split between two screens: his phone’s, where he’s talking to me from Los Angeles, and his computer’s, where he’s scrutinizing an online auction of Mouna Ayoub’s Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld collection. The French Lebanese socialite is doing away with 252 pieces from her substantial haute couture archive, and Valencia is eyeing the magnificent black silk crepe gown from Chanel’s 1992 couture collection that Christy Turlington first wore on the runway, and that Lily-Rose Depp reintroduced at the 2019 Met Gala.
“I like to see myself as a vessel for transitory beauty,” says Valencia with a laugh. The vintage dealer, who started his business officially in 2018 after years of amateur thrifting amid a career in the buying team at Vivienne Westwood, is part of a new generation of fiercely proactive hunters whom fashion fanatics around the world enlist to find the buzziest and most highly sought-after vintage of the moment. That one archive Chanel fall 1991 belt that Linda Evangelista wore on the runway? Valencia’s got it. The elusive Marc Jacobs Kiki boots? Doja Cat bought them from his shop.
Of course, you didn’t always need a bespoke hunter to find good vintage, but the culture around archival fashion has pushed the market to a new frontier replete with its own trend cycle, must-haves, and hype products. The days of casually strolling into a consignment shop on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to find an affordable Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche jacket? They’re long over. Today’s vintage enthusiasts aren’t hoping to be surprised by a great find—they’re hunting to order and know exactly what they want.
“Now anybody can have fashion—that’s the new thing,” says stylist turned curator Renée Howard. “It makes it less special. I know that only a couple people in the world have the pieces I have from years ago, and that’s what makes others want them.” Which only makes her wardrobe—ranging from vintage Versace and John Galliano to contemporary Schiaparelli—all the more prized. For Howard, a longtime client of Valencia’s, this newfound fevered fascination with rare vintage can largely be explained by noting that high fashion used to be, for the most part, produced in limited quantities—so if you have it, you know that practically no one else does. “That’s why you don’t just get rid of fashion,” Howard says: Because the unsung treasures of the past have become today’s grails.
Howard and Valencia first connected over Instagram when she commented on one of his posts of John Galliano’s newsprint dress for Christian Dior. “I have it, and I don’t think he believed me, so he asked for a photo,” says Howard. And while she told Valencia that she had no plans to sell the piece anytime soon—Galliano’s work, both for his eponymous label and for Dior, is currently among the rarest and most covetable vintage—they became fast friends and soon started working together to curate her wardrobe.
There’s also the internet of it all. Over the past couple of years, by way of Instagram fashion archives and the advent of TikTok and Depop, vintage reselling has evolved from a niche pursuit to a fully fledged industry. “Now it’s more name-driven than anything else,” says Roberto Cowan of the Tucson-based Desert Vintage, which he runs with Salima Boufelfel and which specializes in increasingly fleeting period pieces and the cerebral designers of the 20th century—plus some Yves Saint Laurent. Clients today, though, are becoming more and more specific with their requests—a Westwood corset, a John Galliano bias-cut slip dress—which, these hunters argue, is deeply tied to what we see online.
“If it’s a piece you can link back to a runway image, it automatically is worth tens of thousands of dollars,” says Cherie Balch of the Canadian shop Shrimpton Couture, who is known for finding the dreamiest and most fantastic of vintage couture dresses. (That applies to non-runway pieces that have been documented on celebrities too.) Still, if the original appeal of vintage was in finding and wearing something no one else has, the 2024 tweak is that it should also be something that people recognize—and therefore know how hard it is to find. Vintage dealing has become a competitive sport.
“When you’ve been doing this for long enough, stuff makes its way to you,” says Balch, who consistently and instinctively “pre-buys” to stock her archive—a quality that proved essential when sourcing Chanel for her client Kiely MacLean’s wedding wardrobe. MacLean had originally bought a light blue fall 1976 Chanel couture dress from Balch—only to have the piece stolen when her car was broken into weeks before her wedding. “She understood how special all this was to me, and that I really wanted vintage Chanel,” says MacLean, a CEO and entrepreneur in the environmental industry. MacLean created a detailed mood-board-like document replete with photos of pieces she loved from previous runways, which informed Balch’s hunt through her archive. MacLean was thrilled to settle on both a pink couture gown from the ’70s and a tiered iteration from 2013. “Cherie is like a fairy godmother,” she gushes.
Though Balch’s extensive archive sets her business apart, the process of finding pieces is the same for any vintage hunter and requires building an extensive network of dealers across different specialties: designers, time periods, antiques. The bigger the Rolodex, the higher the success rate of finding just the piece your client is looking for—be that a prospective bride, a celebrity (or their stylist—Balch often works with Samantha McMillen, who regularly dresses Elle Fanning in vintage pieces from her collection), or a mere fashion obsessive. The key, assuming one already knows their way around the right auctions and estate sales, is to remain grounded—or, as Cowan puts it, to not get “paddle-happy.”
“I can get excited and bid for something I don’t need, or that I shouldn’t buy,” Cowan says. He and Boufelfel have learned, with time, to remove themselves emotionally from the transaction. “You need to practice some detachment,” Boufelfel says. They now bid silently and leave before the actual action starts.
Daphne Javitch, a womenswear consultant turned health coach who is a recurrent customer at Desert Vintage, describes her wardrobe as “98 percent vintage and 2 percent The Row.” Her personal style, minimal and uncomplicated, dovetails nicely with the sort of pieces Cowan scouts and buys. “Roberto is famous for having the most stamina to hunt,” says Javitch. “He also manages to get into the closets of ladies who have incredible vintage collections that seem to be out of limits for everyone else.”
Equally as important as access, though, is the ability to forecast where the vintage tide will shift next. Howard recalls with some awe how Valencia anticipated the wave of interest in Thierry Mugler’s work circa 2021 as Casey Cadwallader’s own iteration of the French house gained traction on pop stars and celebrities. (Valencia hunted down two Mugler pieces for Howard prior to the designer’s 2022 passing—the famous Vampire dress from his fall 1981 collection and a pair of velvet shorts from Mugler’s fall 1991 Music-Hall lineup—both of which he found by scouring auctions.) At the moment, Valencia is keeping an eye on pieces from Halston and Stephen Sprouse, Boufelfel and Cowan think it’s high time that Joan Vass and Ann Demeulemeester got their flowers, and Balch hopes people dive into Emanuel Ungaro (still, she thinks that the most underrated of them all is Marc Bohan and his work at Christian Dior). All of the vintage hunters I spoke with, though, agree that John Galliano’s work is currently among the most (if not the most) sought-after. “For years, because of the controversy around him, his items did not move at resale,” says Balch, “but his talent is hard to ignore, as is the beauty of what he created—so now his work is insanely expensive—it’s just so hot right now.”
There’s also the futures market to contend with: Who are the designers working today that vintage hunters will be chasing in 20 years? Jonathan Anderson is a name that comes up, as is Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry (Howard recently had Valencia hunt down a pair of his sold-out golden-toe boots for her). Sarah Burton’s work at Alexander McQueen is already popular—and the fact that she just left her post will only make her runway collections more covetable, says Balch. (McQueen is currently trending as a whole—a new designer at the house, in this case Seán McGirr, always ignites a newfound interest in its archive. One of our hunters is looking for Lee McQueen’s original, infamous “Bumster” trousers from the early ’90s, which were produced in very limited quantities, making for a hard—but not impossible—search. “You just have to know who to call,” says Valencia.)
The one question not to ask vintage hunters: What’s the next big thing? “We don’t speak of it until it’s in our hands,” says Howard. The thing about vintage is that the moment people start to talk about it, it becomes a thing—and thus both harder to find and more expensive to buy. The other thing about vintage? Longing is forever, and the wheel keeps spinning. Valencia didn’t land that Chanel dress that he was eyeing during our call—it sold to someone else for $82,242—but not to worry: There’s always next time.
