THE WARDROBE HUNTERS
MEET THE WOMEN WHO WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO FIND FASHION’S MOST COVETED ITEMS
Meet the women who can track down any fashion item (even if it’s sold out).
FORGET THE MAGNIFYING GLASS and deerstalker hat — the Sherlock Holmes of the fashion scene comes with far better style. Bettina Looney answers the door to her London apartment wearing an Alessandra Rich blazer with crystal buttons, black balloon trousers, Salvatore Ferragamo vintage pumps and a velvet scrunchie. “If a client wants something, we’ll find it,” she says, beckoning me inside.
Looney’s job rests on her success at finding the things no-one else can. She is one of a number of elite wardrobe hunters — a self-styled, newfangled career that sees her scouring the world for fashion’s most coveted and exclusive items. Her customer: the sort of woman who has everything, except for a piece from Marc Jacobs’ famed original grunge collection for Perry Ellis from SS93, that is.
She recounts the time a client “just had to have” a limitededition, personalised Christian Dior Book Tote. At the time, the bag had little availability in Asia (where the client was based), and personalisation was only available in Paris. Within hours, Looney had located the bag in a London boutique, prevailed in some high-level fashion negotiations to have it personalised, and had it wrapped, boxed and sent off to its new owner.
Then there was the time a client had her heart set on a Carolina Herrera crochet bikini – a runway design that had never gone into production. So Looney called in a favour and had a friend who owned a luxury swimwear brand whip up a one-of-a-kind facsimile, all in time for her client’s holiday. And that other time, she says, her voice somewhat tightening at the memory, when a longstanding client asked her to source one of the fashion world’s Holy Grail items: tickets to a run of Paris Fashion Week shows. “That was a bit complicated,” she says, smiling. “But yes, we were able to manage that, too.”
Hunting down fashion’s most elusive pieces requires an intricate web of connections across the globe, forged through tireless networking. Many of the women who do this (for they are primarily women) have years of experience as fashion stylists behind them, meaning they have a little black book of the world’s best tailors, designers and go-to people who can help accommodate their clients’ most exacting style demands. Looney is a little different. Her first job in fashion was as a personal shopper at online concierge service Threads Styling. She went on to become a style influencer — she currently has more than 65,000 followers on Instagram alone — and has worked with brands such as Marc Jacobs and Tory Burch. Yet her job as a wardrobe hunter for the world’s greatest fashion lovers is the one she spends most of her days working on, and where the majority of her income is made.
Most of Looney’s clients are from North America or the Middle East and are highnet-worth women (or the children of high-networth families), ranging in age from 17 to 60. Their demands can vary, from a complete wardrobe refresh to simple styling requests, but most of all they want the items that no-one else has. This means if Harrods has a delivery of Chloé bags, they want to be one of the first to have one. “We have a very niche clientele of about 30 people who we give a well-rounded service to,” she says, explaining that she deals with most of her international clients through Whatsapp. “The buzz of people hearing that we can find specific items is opening the floodgates,” she adds, wide-eyed.
It’s the close relationship Looney has with brands and retailers that keeps her clients loyal and her sourcing techniques on point. The morning before we meet, she’d been to Dover Street Market to see the new Bottega Veneta drop – “There were some incredible pieces that have obviously been really difficult to find” – which included a number of iterations of The Pouch, a butter-soft, slouchy leather clutch that has had people in palpitations since its debut. Harrods will also contact her regularly to preview new pieces because they know she has an eager — and wealthy — clientele waiting. Whenever something particularly tantalising comes up, she will be the first to know, posting it on her Instagram Stories or directly on Whatsapp, and the client queries come rolling in. In the first 30 minutes of our interview alone, she receives 34 messages from clients, who are checking upon orders or enquiring about specific pieces she’s posted.
Some requests take longer than others to complete. One client was desperate to have a pair of earrings from a high-end fine jewellery brand that had stopped making them. “She was very, very set on this pair and we were able to find the gemstone sourcer used by the brand and re-create the earrings from the actual source, which was incredible,” she says.
Closer to home in Sydney, stylist and wardrobe hunter Gabriel Waller is equally hard at work. Waller has made her name finding trophy pieces for Rosie Huntington-whiteley, Hailey Bieber and Kourtney Kardashian, and now has to work across European and Australian time zones to keep up with demand. “I will hunt down that item in every market worldwide until I find it,” she says. Similarly to Looney, it’s Waller’s contacts and ability to get through fashion loopholes that keep her business thriving. “I’m constantly getting fed information about what’s just arrived or what’s coming in next week,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode.” Waller filters her requests through an assistant in Paris – having someone in a European time zone helps her keep on top of up to 50 requests at a time, which can include anything from tracking down a pair of Yeezys to Saint Laurent’s iconic crystal-embellished boots. At the moment, it’s Bottega Veneta’s chain mesh pumps and Amina Muaddi’s embellished sandals that her clients are lusting over — just in time for party season.
The process is the same for celebrities as it is for regular shoppers. Back in December 2018, Huntington-whiteley posted an Instagram Story asking her followers to help her find a Phoebe Philo-era Céline blanket coat. One of the model’s friends referred her to Waller, who knew of a boutique in Denmark that still had one of the belted designs. So, of course, she snapped it up and had it shipped straight to Huntington-whiteley. She received it less than a week after first making contact with Waller. The cost to Huntington-whiteley? The price of the coat, plus Waller’s finder’s fee. Huntington-whiteley then posted the coat to her Instagram account, tagging @gabwallerdotcom, and subsequently launched Waller to the international market. “Oh my gosh, I literally started crying when I saw that,” gushes Waller. “At the time I had a very strong New Zealand and Australian client base, but that launched me globally. I think it’s because of that that I’ve never had to pay for marketing via influencers or anything like that.”
Huntington-whiteley then introduced Waller to Hailey Bieber’s much-loved stylist Maeve Reilly (these women don’t always advertise their services, so most clients come through word-of-mouth connections). What did Mrs Bieber want? The exact same coat. “That was a sourcing miracle for sure,” Waller recalls. So was finding Kourtney Kardashian’s preferred colour and size of Céline’s cult Madame boots.
Waller still hasn’t met her most famous clients in person. But this is not unusual — Instagram, Whatsapp and the magic of international next-day shipping render geography all but obsolete. The stylist says if she never travels again, she’ll still have a robust business. All she needs is her phone to contact the teams at designer boutiques, keep tabs on sellers’ inventories and track shipments. She doesn’t like to decline a request,
“THE BUZZ of PEOPLE HEARING THAT WE can find SPECIFIC ITEMS is OPENING the FLOODGATES”
though she did temporarily retire Huntington-whiteley’s coat after being “inundated” by similar requests. “There was no way I was going to find 100 of these coats, so I said no. It was hard for me, but I couldn’t accept requests and let people down when I knew in my heart it wouldn’t be possible.”
Ask a wardrobe hunter what qualities determine the items on their clients’ wish lists, and the same themes come up: rarity and ephemerality. The most lusted-after runway designs often accrue long pre-order lists and effectively sell out before reaching the shop floor. Other items are only released in certain markets. A landmark collection is enough to create a buzz that will cause a spike in requests. As soon as designer Phoebe Philo announced that she intended to leave Céline after 10 years at the house, fans began snapping up everything they could find. Her mismatched boots, angular sunglasses and perfect tailoring all became collectors’ items, pushing prices of some pieces up to 30 per cent higher than when they were in season. Now, Bottega Veneta, under the direction of Philo’s ex-designer Daniel Lee, is causing a fashion ruckus. The brand’s immediately sold-out AW19-20 pouches, puffy quilted mules and strappy square-toed sandals proved massive fodder for the personal shopping set.
In terms of the fashion ecosystem, scarcity begets desire begets requests for the likes of Looney and Waller. Sometimes the women making these requests won’t even wear the sourced item. For them, it’s more about the idea of owning a piece of fashion history, and the prestige that naturally comes with it. And while, as you might expect, wardrobe hunters are particularly discreet about putting a figure against their fees and how much clients are willing to pay for the most sought-after pieces, most match the brands’ pricing and then charge a finder’s fee on top, which could be a flat rate of $300-$400 or a percentage of the final value.
What these wardrobe hunters have done is make shopping feel frictionless. They’ve turned standard impediments to buying — such as geography, scarcity, lack of time and lack of confidence — into surmountable challenges. They’ve also made it possible for clients to buy some of the most coveted items, even if they never plan to wear them. And as long as there’s status attached to owning that must-have “old” Céline coat or a tweed two-piece from King Karl’s final collection, there will be a demand for these women to find them. As Looney says, “Once your clients respect and understand your service, it’s hard for them to shop anywhere else.”
“SOMETIMES the [client] WON’T EVEN WEAR the ITEM. IT’S MORE ABOUT OWNING A PIECE of FASHION HISTORY”