Behind The Chloë Sevigny Sale of the Century
Lynn Yaeger, Sally Singer, storage units, and the vintage revolution!
I’m recovering from The Sale of the Century and wanted to recap a little bit…forgive me, I’m still sleeping and very foggy! Please watch #NEVERWORNS on YouTube…more episodes coming soon x.
I took a break from #NEVERWORNS because….well, I was planning The Sale of the Century. It was a fever dream, featuring the goods my assistant and I cleaned out from Chloë Sevigny’s storage unit, the pouf-pumped closets of Lynn Yaeger and Sally Singer, the jewels of Mickey Boardman, and designs of The Academy New York by my friend Chelsea Zalopany’s man, Swaim Hutson. Mazel Tov to everyone who came through, made it through the line that wrapped around the block (twice), and walked away with not just an item but an experience.
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Something that made The Sale of the Century so incredible was that Chloë told many shoppers the stories behind her pieces. This was the whole ethos of the sale: to offer people a Narnia portal through someone’s vintage clothes. And many of these pieces were lived-in and simple! A no-name vintage sweater she wore when she first flirted with her husband! A black Hugo Boss mini skirt that she sported everywhere in the mid-’00s, including in a photo with Lance Bass (lol!). A vintage silk floral print slip dress of the palest yellow from her high school years.
We’ve all seen the photos of her looking effortless and having a good time in these pieces. We’ve all read the stories of her taking the train down from Darien, Connecticut to hang out in Washington Square Park and then magically end up in a Sonic Youth music video or in the pages of Sassy. How could we not want a slice of that cool? The same goes for when I was helping Sally with her closet and she unearthed a pair of funky cowboy boots that she wore while she was waitressing when she first moved to New York City, or Lynn who waxed poetic about an antique coat she bought at a flea market in Paris.
I love vintage just as much as everyone else but what I really love about vintage is that we all have the ability to create a universe from it. To explain this I have to recount a story I told at the sale to critic Rachel Tashjian of Opulent Tips and now of The Washington Post (she wrote a BANGING article that captured the essence of the sale). I was once a teen in the mid-’00s in a small New England town dreaming to get the hell out. My life was fueled by burned CDs of The Libertines, stacks of fashion magazines I’d buy with a busgirl paycheck from the local pizza shop I worked at, endless magazine tears of the model Isabeli Fontana, and the hope that one day I’d leave that place for New York City.
During this time, I would explore fashion blogs and online diaries. These platforms were my outlets to focus more on what models were wearing backstage at Viktor & Rolf rather than hating myself for failing remedial math. I followed the blog of model Taylor Warren who had left her own small town to go to New York City. She was living in a smoke cloud of what I considered to be dreamy life! Her blog reportage was filled with things that were exciting to me while stuck in Somewheresville, USA: Brooklyn basement parties, taking the subway to fashion shoots, cigarettes but in New York City. This felt foreign and exciting for someone like me whose weekend highlight was smoking Marlboro 27s in the Stop & Shop parking lot.
At one point, Warren announced that she was selling clothes and I ended up buying a nuclear blue polka dot cropped sweater that she herself thrifted. It was indie sleaze to the core and something we’d both probably consider heinous now. (We’ve since connected! How about that?!) But this sweater was my link to someone else far, far away who was living in a place that I had only dreamed of. In a way, it was a ticket out.
Clothes that are connected to people who we love and admire have the ability to transport us somewhere else. That’s a given. Sometimes I think that sort of soul is lost in this wild world of resale—so I appreciate context to guide me. When I was in high school, I saw Kate Moss wearing a leather jacket, so I bought a vintage leather jacket in Boston, which made me feel like I was the supermodel hanging out with Primal Scream even though I was really just a kid clearing plates from a pizza restaurant’s tables. And I still feel this way about clothes: a freaky little thrifted vintage Blumarine top can help me world-build my boring day into a saucy night at a Georgian restaurant on Avenue U. The fantasy of clothes can sometimes lead me to a reality.
The Sale of the Century was for dreamers and fashion lovers. I want the vintage of #NEVERWORNS to eventually be for every kid who feels a bit lost smoking cigarettes in the Stop & Shop parking lot. After all, we were—and in some way—are still that kid.
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The Sale of the Century was truly one of the best days of my life! I literally had so much fun waiting in line. We became friends with the girl standing next to us, and we’re all going for drinks tomorrow night :) and i will be wearing my signed chloe clogs! cheers to you liana!!
I love the adverts for this so much! Just what Chloë (and Sally and Lynn) deserved <3, no sans serif bullshit but a proper ANNOUNCEMENT.