La Dolce Vintage

VESTIAIRE COLLECTIVE CELEBRATED ITS 10TH ANNIVERSARY THROUGH AN AMBITIOUS COLLABORATION WITH ECO AGE THAT SCOURED THE GLOBE FOR VINTAGE COUTURE AND ACCESSORIES. ZANETA CHENG HEARS FROM VESTIAIRE’S SOPHIE HERSAN HOW THEY PULLED IT OFF

Over the past decade or so, attitudes towards sustainability within fashion have veered so dramatically that what was once a niche cause is now a mainstream movement, with luxury and mass fashion groups adjusting their corporate strategies for a trend that’s here to stay. This shift is in no small part thanks to fashion-market players like e-reseller Vestiaire Collective, which began in 2009 as an online consignment platform in France and has now grown into a global pre-owned-luxury retailer that recently opened its first permanent physical space at Selfridges in London.

To mark its 10th anniversary, Vestiaire partnered with Livia Firth’s Eco Age, to dress attendees of the Green Carpet Fashion Awards in vintage couture pieces. For this, the collective’s co-founder and fashion director Sophie Hersan dug into the fashion history she studied at Esmod in Paris, as well as years of styling in the industry, to curate a selection of some 200 couture pieces that represent the best of fashion between the years 1960 and 2000. With the blessing of Carlo Capasa at Camera Nazionale dela Moda Italiana (the National Chamber of Italian Fashion), Vestiaire’s initiative is catapulting vintage into the high-octane glamour of Milan Fashion Week.

How did your collaboration with Livia Firth’s Eco Age come about?

We reached out to her to ask if she’d be interested in collaborating. Obviously there’s a synergy between what we’re trying to achieve and what they’re trying to achieve. Both of us were excited to collaborate. What we’re doing is making gowns available for people who are going to the Green Carpet Awards ceremony, so they can visit over the next few days and have pieces to wear. We’re hoping to support Livia and what she’s trying to achieve with the Green Carpet, but also to shine the spotlight on the importance that fashion can have in a sustainable approach to red-carpet dressing.

The pieces the Vestiaire team sourced for the Green Carpet Awards are all “vintage”. What was your relationship with vintage or second-hand clothing?

I’ve always had something vintage. Less second-hand, perhaps, but true vintage pieces. A vintage piece is emotion. It’s not necessarily something you’re looking for but sometimes it’s the emotion you get when looking at it. You know, when you work in fashion as I did before Vestiaire, I was constantly inspired by vintage. The history of the product, how many lives it’s had before it came into my ownership, the craftsmanship of the product – these really touched me a lot.

I discovered second-hand a little later, just before launching Vestiaire, because it was evident that there was a market for it. It was in 2009 and [my co-founders and I] wanted to consume less and better because we had 10 bags and only really wore two of them. And it occurred to me that it was wasteful to have all of them. The more time’s passed, the more conscious I’ve become. Now I only buy second-hand.

That’s also linked to our selection on the site and knowing what the strong pieces are according to the history of fashion. We’re also seeing millennials and Gen Z being more concerned with sustainability. What they want is something unique. They want something rare. Because of social media, the younger generations want something singular, so they hunt for pieces that you can’t find anywhere else. They want to be unique. So they’re hunting for vintage and second-hand pieces that you can’t find any more.

Tell us about the brands you curated and the type of gowns and pieces that you’ve sourced and displayed.

Christian Dior, Chloé and Yves Saint Laurent were my cri de coeur, as well as Dior by John Galliano. Also, we have a Gaultier dress. I don’t want to be too French in my answer. But also, we’re in Italy. We’re the French chic, the elegance, but also the glamourous Italian couture – it was really a mix of these two inspirations.

We only had three months, but really wanted to make sure that the pieces we found were the crème de la crème. The 200 or so pieces we found are unique. So they’re difficult to replace. -ither we find a good one or forget it, we have to find something else. But it was important to have pieces that are really strong and representative of Christian Dior history, of John Galliano style and Gaultier style.

But the gowns and pieces for the Green Carpet Awards were couture-level. How did you manage to source them?

We have a global workroom today with an excellent team of hunters to source inventory for our website in addition to our community of sellers and buyers. Our community brings a lot to this inventory but it’s also up to us to go and complete this inventory if we don’t have all the inventory that we want.

We contacted our professional sellers and partners to tell them that we were looking for specifically pieces between the 1960s to the 2000s. Why? Because these are the major decades of fashion history that have had profound impact on fashion today.

To be honest, for this project, there were quite a few dresses that were a bit touch and go as to whether our team would be able to get a hold of them. We’d have one moment where we thought we’d got it and then it would be a no. There were many factors to consider, like the traceability of the item. Who was the last owner of the dress that we’d seen in the papers or a magazine or a book? We want the dress. Who’s the owner? Vintage is usually an emotional activity but the hunt that we went on for this project was exhilarating.