The co-founder and fashion director of Vestiaire Collective talks about the power of old clothes and the harms of the fashion industry’s old habits
At Vestiaire Collective, old clothes are gold. To be precise, old clothes are worth at least US $1.7 billion, which is how much the Paris-based luxury resale platform was valued at in 2021. And to think that the billion-dollar idea for the company came out of a closet.
“I looked at my wardrobe and said, ‘If I close my eyes, do I know how many pieces I have? How many do I actually wear, versus how much I own?’” recalled Sophie Hersan, Vestiaire Collective’s co-founder and fashion director, about the day that she decided to confront her overconsumption of clothing. The year was 2009. The world was still recovering from the Global Financial Crisis, and Hersan herself was reckoning with the reality of the luxury fashion industry that she worked in.
“It didn’t make sense anymore how the industry was run by excess and overproduction,” she said. Hersan had found that the cycle of new collections that fashion brands followed basically drove people to buy more than they needed. And looking at her own closet, she concluded that the Pareto principle could be applied to it: “I was wearing maybe 20 per cent of my wardrobe, and the rest was waste.”
What to do with all the old clothes, then? Hersan and her friend Fanny Moizant came to the same conclusion: sell them. That year, the two women launched Vestiaire Collective out of Moizant’s apartment in Paris. The website offered over 2,000 pre-loved luxury pieces, previously owned by Hersan, Moizant, and their friends.
“We wanted to propose a new way of consuming fashion and loving fashion,” said Hersan about her shared goal with Moizant, who is now president of Vestiaire Collective. “I remember that we had a card that said, ‘We sell what we love.’”
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Today, on Vestiaire Collective’s website and app, you will find a treasure trove of luxury goods, including Chanel handbags, Gucci sneakers, Prada sunglasses, Hermès scarves and Louis Vuitton travel bags. These are offered out of the wardrobes of over seven million users on the platform, across over 50 countries in Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. Singapore, Hersan noted, is Vestiaire Collective’s second largest market in Asia after Hong Kong. Summing up the global appeal of the secondhand platform, Hersan said, “You can access good brands and better quality for a better price.”
Indeed, Hersan herself was proudly dressed in pre-loved fashion from Vestiaire Collective for our interview. Her vintage watch was from Cartier, her leather jacket was from Fendi, and her belt was from Chanel. And she could say so with absolute certainty, thanks to the company’s unmatched authentication processes.
“We said we wanted to identify every item we sell, and people said that we were totally crazy because it was a nightmare, logistically,” shared Hersan. “But we wanted to do it, so we did it from day one.”
In order to differentiate itself from other resale platforms, which Hersan noted were selling “a lot of fakes”, Vestiaire Collective began hiring experts, some from auction houses, who specialised in luxury fashion, watches and gemmology, to verify the items sold on the platform. In 2017, the company launched the Vestiaire Academy, where employees now undergo at least 750 hours of training to become authenticators. Today, it boasts a team of 80 experts working across its five authentication centres in France, Hong Kong, the US, the United Kingdom, and the latest location, South Korea.
“We have amassed a lot a knowledge on authentication,” revealed Hersan. “Luxury brands have even asked us to authenticate their items. They are less able to do it than we are because our experts verify so many items everyday, and they know all the details.”
In fact, the likes of Gucci, Chloé and Alexander McQueen have even partnered with Vestiaire Collective to resell their items on the platform. Hersan shared that these collaborations have only brought the company closer to realising its mission “to promote sustainable fashion by empowering our community to drive change.”
