Why a Top Collector Is Splitting With Her Beloved Balenciaga
A lesson we all need. The new #NEVERWORNS video is in here. The rare Balenciaga clothes are for sale in the chat.
Today is the #NEVERWORNS video with Eden, an avid Nicolas Ghesquiére-era Balenciaga collector. She is parting with a lot of her collection, so to shop it, head over to #NEVERWORNS chat and claim it.
“There’s never going to be a good time to let go,” is what Eden Pritikin says, one of the most well-known collectors of Nicolas Ghesquiére-era Balenciaga. Well, after over eight years of collecting one of the most rare and niche eras of Balenciaga, Pritikin is finally letting go. There’s a version of the spring 2002 black cargo dress that Kate Moss wore to a party. You know the photo: Moss is smoking a cigarette, buzzed, beautiful, and holding a white fur chubby on her shoulders. Gone. There’s a scuba “Jungle Print” dress from spring 2003, the same one Pritikin discovered has the graphic ripped from a Siegfried & Roy “Wake Up To the Rainforest” T-shirt. Well, goodbye.
I have a great collection of Tom Ford-era Gucci that I’ve been collecting for some time. Sure, I’ve let go of a few busted pieces over the years but can I fathom parting with that 1-800-Sandals blue button up from fall 1995? The shirt that Madonna wore when Courtney Love threw a shoe at her at the MTV VMAs? The one that I wrote about for Vogue after I bulldozed through James Veloria to snag it? The shirt that transforms me into an oligarch’s wife; an elegant call girl; a pop star skank; some nouveau riche siren marooned in Park Slope? You can’t pry her from me.
Emotion by way of cloth has a real grip on us all. (Read my Closet Psyche with Nicolaia Rips about parting with clothes from her mother.) Any grain of sentimentality attached to clothing makes it that much more difficult to say adios to something. But that’s the whole theme of #NEVERWORNS. Why are we keeping clothes that we aren’t wearing?
Pritikin is different. She isn’t sentimental about clothes like I or many people are. Part of this may be because Pritikin is by nature a self-described “crazy minimalist” who doesn’t like to hold onto physical things. “I don’t like to look around me and see clutter,” she says. This way of thinking perhaps helped Pritikin when she first began collecting Balenciaga: She had a zen-soaked brain and knew that it was all temporary. “The pieces I was buying were never going to be forever pieces for me. I was always going to let go of them,” she says. “I always looked at myself as the middleman. I was just a custodian of them for a piece of time so that I could help find them a better home.”
For Pritikin, the thrill of procuring was the most exciting part of collecting Balenciaga but that would wane as the pieces became more difficult to find. After all, she began collecting at a time when not many people were basking in the glory of Ghesquiére’s Balenciaga—and suddenly, they were. Skyrocketing prices would reflect that interest. “It has become impossible to find a pair of 2002 cargo pants for 20 euros on Depop. That’s what I was doing six years ago. But you can’t do that anymore, so that takes some of the fun out of it,” she says, adding.,“For me, it’s more about the experience than it is about a tangible item. So holding onto these items doesn’t hold any emotional value to me, versus the process of collecting them, holding onto them and setting them free is more meaningful to me.” Chic.
Her wardrobe has changed as well. Pritikin has been wearing vintage Donna Karan and Jil Sander, as well as Hedi Slimane’s Celine. “I want to build a wardrobe that I can actually wear with my Balenciaga pieces. I’ve been so obsessed with preserving them that I have an entire wardrobe that I just don’t wear,” she says. “To me, that seems kind of wasteful.”
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody around, does it even make a sound? If you have a great Balenciaga dress, but aren’t smoking a cigarette, buzzed, and feeling beautiful in it, are you even really wearing it?
Head to the chat to check out Eden’s Balenciaga pieces for sale.