This gig’s a total ‘stitch hunt’
How the ‘Professor X’ of fashion tracks down the hard-to-find for the well-to-do
Even Kim Kardashian’s konnections couldn’t help score the dress of her dreams: a vintage John Galliano-era Dior frock sewn from faux newsprint and made famous by Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City.” But there was one man who could find it for her.
“She reached out to me, personally, in my DMs, to ask me about it, and whether I had one,” Johnny Valencia told The Post. “That’s the reason Kim K started talking to me.”
He managed to track down the holy grail — but the buyer refused to sell. Nonetheless, Kim was so impressed by his ability to locate the elusive garment that she is now a client, as is her sister Kourtney. And Valencia did manage to make Kim happy with a hard-to-find Jean Paul Gaultier cyber-dot dress from 1995.
As the Los Angeles-base d founder of Pechuga Vintage, Valencia, 33, is the secret weapon — the Indiana Jones — for A-list fashionistas: They can send him on any impossible shopping mission and know they won’t be disappointed.
Valencia, however, suggests a different movie analogy.
“You know the X-Men? Professor Xavier has this tracking device that tracks all these mutants all over the world. Well, that’s kinda like my memory for fashion,” he said, adding that, as a Virgo, he’s painstakingly detailed, too.
Whatever the source of his superpowers, Valencia is making a healthy living, with his highest single sale in 2021 hitting $50,000.
The premise of his online-only business is simple. “Come to me with a request,” he said, “and I’ll see what I can do.” Take HGTV personality Sabrina Soto, who wanted a vintage Vivienne Westwood pirate hat for a recent shoot. Valencia contacted a source — “a surfer from California, who lives life like a socialite but is a punk at heart” — who he knew was an avid collector of that period. The surfer drove a hard bargain, charging Johnny so much that he broke it up into two installments. (Valencia buys on clients’ betaking half outright, a cut on evdoesn’t ery sale, but charge an hourly fee.) “I’m not really in it for the money,” he said.
Still, he’s dealing in pricey treasures, like the $20,000 dress he sold model Lori Harvey. She had DM’ed him asking for a rare Tom Ford-era Gucci frock from 1997, a dress she had failed to find on her own. As soon as she asked Valencia, though, he thought of another client, one who’d grown up in Lonimpressive don and had an haul of catwalk hits from that decade. Sure enough, she had the exact dress, and he brokered the sale within days.
Tyrina Lee, who works in fashion and lives in Beverly Hills, said she’s probably spent $10,000 or so with Valencia, building up her
collection, much of which is from Dior.
“People can’t believe I can acquire these pieces — it’s things you don’t think that anybody could find. You give him a task, and he comes back not only with the item but with a story on how he got it,” Lee, 35, said. “He’s gone to Paris to pick up stuff for me.”
‘I am obsessed’
Lee recalled the first time she bought from Valencia, and how suspicious she was.
She wanted to wear a particular Galliano-era Dior puffer jacket — but, she said, there were perhaps three ever made.
“No one could find this jacket for me, and I’d been looking for five years. So I told my assistant that I was getting scammed when [Valencia] said he’d have it to my hotel by the next morning,” she said.
When the package arrived the next day at 10 a.m., “I was in tears. I called him up and said, ‘You have an official buyer, I am obsessed,’ and I started giving him impossible tasks. But when he says he’ll try to find something? It means he definitely will.”
Luxury hunting is an unlikely career path for Johnny, who was born to an immigrant family from El Salvador and smart enough at school for his family to expect him to become a diplomat.
He scored a gig in France as prep for that but quickly pivoted when he arrived, “Emily in Paris” style, in the City of Light.
All the other kids in his tony program at a university there, Valencia recalls, were kitted out in designer threads.
“I would see them coming in, in beautifully tailored macs and fulllength mink coats, and was, like, ‘Where do I get one of those?’ ” he said.
The answer: the Vivienne Westwood boutique in Marais, where Valencia sprung for a coat that cost three times his rent. It changed his life — at least once he paid off the bill — by sparking a fascination for fashion that he parlayed into gigs at a public relations firm and as a freelance party photographer in LA.
“I was a junior publicist pitching bras and diamonds, and it taught me I could sell water to a fish,” he said.
Soon, Valencia was using his passion for research and Professor X-like powers of location to deal vintage as a side hustle. He quickly recognized it could be the main gig.
‘Dream come true’
That was three years ago, and since then, he’s worked with everyone from Law Roach — the stylist to Zendaya and Halsey whom he calls a mentor — to countless private clients, celebrity and otherwise, including Madonna, Grimes and Bella Hadid.
Couture collector Renée Howard is another Valencia booster. The Orange County, Calif., resident has relied on him to source hard-to-find garments like pieces of Jean Paul Gaultier’s cyber-dot collection from the 1990s.
“He makes your fashion dreams come true. He’s the kind of guy who says, ‘I’ve got something for you,’ and BOOM,” she said.
One such wow moment came when she tasked him with rounding out her Versace Pop Art collection.
“‘Can you get me the dress Naomi Campbell wore, to match the pants and jacket?’ ” Howard remembered asking. “Four months later, it’s in my closet.”