Late-night appointments with Offset and Cardi B! Trading Rick Owens for Balenciaga! The secondhand trade in upmarket men’s wear is booming.
In a floor-through loft in SoHo one Friday night in January, Vincent Ferraro was selling luxury clothing. Sort of.
On one side of the room, a tattoo artist covered a young woman’s palm in an illustration of a bankroll. Some people flipped casually through the racks of Chrome Hearts and Enfants Riches Déprimés, but Mr. Ferraro — sinewy, with a shaved head and covered in tattoos — didn’t pay them much mind. Instead, he poured shots of Patrón, posed for Instagram photos and occasionally disappeared with one of the several women who had come to vie for his attention.
On the men’s resale clothing site Grailed, Mr. Ferraro, who before the pandemic worked in nightlife, most recently as general manager and creative director of Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel, sells under the handle 4GSELLER, and in the last couple of years, has become the go-to for rare Chrome Hearts, recent-season Louis Vuitton statement pieces and thrashed vintage dirtbag T-shirts, building a business that he says has annual revenue in the low seven figures.
“I did take, like, a big page out of what I did hospitality-wise and integrate it into what I’m doing,” Mr. Ferraro, 32, said a few weeks before the party, relaxing in the showroom one afternoon in a Yankees fitted cap, white T-shirt and Louis Vuitton ski pants. On the couch next to him he had a small pile of new Chrome Hearts inventory, and one piece in particular stood out: heavyweight black leather cargo pants with exaggerated pockets and built-to-last hardware.
The pants had an original retail price, he said, of around $6,000 to $7,000, but he was planning on listing them for north of $20,000. “The guy who got these waited a year,” he noted, referring to the sometimes lengthy wait for Chrome Hearts orders. “But people aren’t coming here to wait a year. They’re coming to walk out with them right now. So there’s a value to that.”
Still, $20,000 is a few mortgage payments, a diamond necklace, a painting, maybe a small car. Is there no sticker shock?
A Friday night party in January at Vincent Ferraro’s showroom.Credit…Rafael Rios for The New York Times
Welcome to the wild world of men’s luxury resale, which has begun to boom in recent years, owing in large part to the graduation of the young male customer who came of age in the era of limited-edition sneakers and Supreme items as asset classes, and for whom hip-hop icons and sports superstars are also high-fashion heroes.
All of those trends have primed the pump for the luxury men’s resale market, which is broadening rapidly, a growth captured in sellers like Mr. Ferraro; Justin Reed, whose Los Angeles showroom has become a celebrity playpen; and Luke Fracher, something of a modern garmento, who recently opened Luke’s, the first buy-sell-trade shop in New York for this generation of men’s luxury clothing.
“We’re seeing the streetwear-ification of high-end,” Mr. Fracher said over dinner in January at Ludlow House in Manhattan, a few blocks from his narrow-corridor shop just north of Dimes Square. Which is to say that the category of current men’s luxury isn’t Loro Piana and Kiton, but rather Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga, Chrome Hearts and Rick Owens, rare Nikes and archival Raf Simons.
That evolution has been unfolding for more than a decade. There’s an explicit through line from Riccardo Tisci’s invigoration of Givenchy in the early 2010s to Alessandro Michele’s psychedelic-tapestry rebrand of Gucci, to Kim Jones’s streamlining of Dior to, of course, Virgil Abloh’s up-from-spare-parts reconstruction of Louis Vuitton. And by remaking Nike and Vuitton simultaneously, Mr. Abloh implicitly linked their audiences, making clear that a luxury item is something people are willing to splurge on, regardless of which company made it.
Mr. Fracher, 34, was a founder of the Round Two empire, which during the 2010s turned the secondhand T-shirt trade into a multimillion-dollar concern with nine locations in five cities. He left Round Two last year and opened Luke’s in December, betting that some of the customer base that cut its teeth on streetwear and sneakers would be ready to upgrade to something fancier
He also pointed to how insatiable social media feeds have created persistent and renewable demand for luxury clothing. “First of all, it’s the homogenization of how everyone dresses in every city across the world,” he said, emphasizing how clothing has become a globally spoken language. “And then it’s the need to flex nonstop and the need to have new clothing all the time, so you can post fit pics and get the dopamine hit and hopefully get some clout off it.”
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Luke Fracher in the basement of his new consignment store, Luke’s. He was a founder of the Round Two consignment store chain.Credit…Rafael Rios for The New York Times
Source: nytimes.com
