It’s Yasmeen, Cache’s Substack & Editorial Content intern. In today’s piece we are doing a deep dive on what it takes to actually source a unique vintage piece.

A few weeks ago we asked you what your “shoe crushes” were. The shoe that you stay up late dreaming about, the heels that will give you a new personality, the pair that you genuinely believe will solve all of your problems. For me, that shoe is the Chanel Bikini Sandal. This shoe first slid across my desk one year ago. Yes, that’s correct. One year has passed since I first became aware of this shoe’s existence and 365 days, and 12 moons later I STILL think about it.

It all started when I saw this TikTok posted by the iconic Izzi Poopi. Since that day I have yearned for this shoe. And try as I did, I could not find them anywhere. It made me realize that even a professional online shopper like myself has a lot to learn when it comes to true vintage sourcing, thus inspiring me to channel my inner Andie Anderson. Unfortunately, this piece does not end with me marrying Matthew McConaughey. However, I can promise you that by the end you’ll know exactly how to source your dream vintage wardrobe in 10 days.

1. Name it before you hunt for it.

The single biggest reason people never find their grail is that they're searching the wrong terms. It's worth getting obsessively specific: brand, collection, season, hardware detail. A vague term like "vintage floral dress" reads as noise to a search algorithm, while something like "Diane von Furstenberg Origami wrap dress 1970s silk jersey" surfaces a completely different, and much more accurate pool of results. This is something that surprised me the most in my research: reverse image search is a useful tool if you have a rough idea what you’re looking at, but it’s not the shortcut people think it is when it comes to hunting for something specific. It prioritizes visually similar items currently for sale over discontinued or vintage pieces. So, for a novelty runway shoe like the Chanel Bikini sandal, it tends to point you toward generic “beach sandal” listings instead of the actual piece. What actually works better is photographing or noting the details that identify a piece, the specific charm hardware, the sole stamp, the season tag—and turning those into your search terms instead.

How this played out: my first search, “Chanel bikini sandal,” pulled a mix of the real thing buried under a wall of unrelated Chanel flip-flops and slides. Adding “archival” “runway” and “novelty” to the query cut some fluff and showed some more relevant results.

If you genuinely don’t know what season or collection a piece is from, don’t just guess. Posting close-ups in identification communities on reddit forums can get you further, faster. r/findfashion is a quick fix for general modern apparel, but for anything archival or runway-specific, subreddits like r/handbags and r/DesignerReps (especially useful for spotting real construction versus fake, not for buying) tend to consist of people that can date a piece by hardware alone. Shoes don’t carry the same serial-sticker system Chanel bags do, so identifying details live elsewhere: the sole stamp, the box, and the retail tag, which usually references the specific collection by name or season code.

How this played out: without a serial sticker to lean on the way you would with a bag, dating this pair came down almost entirely to matching the hardware against archived runway show photos from the season it debuted, which took longer than I expected. After extensive research I concluded that my beloved bikini sandals are likely from Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2004 collection which showed many similar beach inspired pieces.

2. Stop doing your own dirty work.

Once you know exactly what you’re looking for, the smarter move is to stop refreshing apps by hand. Saved searches with real specificity—collection name plus hardware detail—on The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, and eBay ensure you get notified the moment something that matches instead of finding it three weeks too late. Pairing digital alert systems with precise descriptors is genuinely the difference between finding a specific piece and just hoping you stumble upon it. It also helps to try every synonym a seller might use for a novelty piece, since one listing calls it “bikini accented” and the next calls it “thong sandal” or “swim accent”. It all depends on how the seller catalogued it. It’s worth expanding the hunt beyond one platform. 1stDibs skews toward the archival and museum-tier end of resale specifically, which is exactly the category a discontinued runway novelty shoe falls into.

How this played out: I set up a saved search on The RealReal and 1stDibs using three different phrasings of the same shoe. Because I seem to have chosen the hardest possible shoe for this exercise, I sadly did not get any alerts. All I can find is an expired TRR listing which of course, shows the shoes in my size AND for just $275. God really does have favorites and they are whoever snagged that pair.

3. Go to where the archive actually lives.

If the piece you want is genuinely rare, the deepest inventory in the world isn’t on an app. It’s probably in Japan. Japan’s luxury resale infrastructure—specifically for European houses like Chanel—is enormous and extremely well-organized. Komehyo holds the largest selection nationwide with the most consistent authentication standards, and its Nagoya flagship is genuinely one of the largest secondhand luxury stores in the world. Ginza is the neighborhood to know for this specifically: Daikokuya has operated there since 1947 and it’s considered one of the most trusted names in pre-owned Chanel, Hermès, and Rolex. Brand Off’s Ginza store is famous enough to have an entire floor dedicated to a single category of bag. RagTag, meanwhile, spans both the archival Japanese design end and European luxury, and Chanel pieces regularly turn up on its racks alongside Comme des Garçons and Margiela.

How this played out: unfortunately, I wasn’t able to travel Tokyo for this one, but thankfully Komehyo and RagTag both list a rotating slice of their in-store inventory online. Browsing Komehyo’s Chanel accessories section offered me some beautiful pieces. While they didn’t have my kini sandals, my wishlist nevertheless expanded.

4. Turns out, you can have Japan at home!

Most of the good stuff never even reaches the Japanese storefronts’ online listings in the first place. It moves through Yahoo Japan Auctions and Mercari Japan first, at real domestic prices, before international resellers mark it up and relist it elsewhere. Here’s the catch: Yahoo Auctions Japan requires a Japanese phone number and bank account to bid directly, which most international buyers don’t have. This is where a proxy buying service comes in. Buyee and ZenMarket are the two biggest: Buyee is the one that also lets you buy directly from Mercari, while ZenMarket will accept a manual purchase request from nearly any Japanese shopping URL. This matters for something as specific as a discontinued novelty shoe. Searching in Japanese can makes a real difference too. Something like “シャネル ビキニ チャーム サンダル” surfaces a completely different and much deeper pool of listings than the English-keyword version of the same search ever will.

How this played out: I decided to go with ZenMarket for my search. I went with two Japanese searches. The first was more specific, asking for Chanel bikini sandals in black and the second asking just for Chanel beach sandals. I did not find my coveted kini sandals but I did find some very very cool Chanel pieces. See my personal favorite below.

Something I wish I learned before running this experiment: timing matters more than people expect. A lot of Japanese sellers list items starting at one yen, ending the next day. And, if you're checking late on Friday or Saturday nights, you can end up paying a fraction of what the same piece costs once it's already been resold internationally. It's still worth checking seller feedback carefully before bidding, and it's worth knowing going in that a proxy purchase doesn't come with any authenticity guarantee, since the proxy service is only responsible for shipping the item to you, not verifying it.

With that being said, there's a reason Japan's resale market feels safer than most. The country has some of the strictest anti-counterfeit laws in the world, and any registered secondhand business has to hold a specific license just to legally buy and resell used goods. That's also part of why the inventory itself runs so deep. A huge wave of Chanel and Hermès pieces entered Japan during the country's 1980s "bubble economy," when luxury handbags went from aspirational to mainstream almost overnight. Even after the bubble burst in the early 90s, those pieces didn't disappear. They just kept getting authenticated and resold through licensed shops in the decades since. There’s still an important caveat: that license requirement covers actual businesses, not random individual sellers on Yahoo Auctions or Mercari, so a peer-to-peer proxy buy still has some risk.

5. Build relationships, not just search history.

The last unlock is the least algorithmic one. If you’re hunting consistently rather than just once, an actual relationship with consignment buyers and archive dealers pays off in a way that no saved search ever can. Dealers who specialize in runway and archival pieces often hear about a specific item coming up for consignment before it’s ever publicly listed, especially for something as niche as a single-season novelty shoe. It’s also worth asking directly about a piece’s history when a seller does have it, since a shoe that’s been stored in its original box and worn once is a very different purchase from one that’s been through several closets, even when both photograph the same way. If you keep coming back to the same two or three dealers, chances are that you’ll eventually get access before the piece is even listed anywhere at all.

How this played out: I reached out to a seller on Vestiaire Collective who specializes in archival Chanel runway pieces just to ask if she’d ever come across this specific style, without expecting much. She hadn’t, but said she’d keep an eye out and flagged a different Chanel novelty piece from the same era that I hadn’t known to look out for. That’s a lead that a search alert could never have found. In my final act of desperation, I attempted to contact the very person this hunt came to be, miss Izzi herself. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!!! At least I tried guys.

The girl always gets the guy!

Well, Andie Anderson may have walked away with Mr. McConaughey, but I’m walking away with a self administered degree in designer sourcing (and hopefully you are too!!). While this journey didn’t end with me waltzing into the sunset, Chanel Bikini Sandals on my feet, I learned A LOT. The difference between someone who stumbles upon a good vintage piece once and someone who can track down a specific one on purpose isn’t luck. It’s knowing the exact words to search, knowing which alerts to set, knowing which Tokyo neighborhood to search from (whether in person or from a couch on the other side of the world), and knowing which sellers to actually build a relationship with. It might take me a little longer than 10 days, but one day I will find my beloved swimsuit sandals. And when I do, both my bank account and I will be ready!

Happy sourcing!

xoxo Yasmeen 💚

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• The RealReal Just Confirmed What We’ve All Known: Resale Isn’t a Backup Plan Anymore: The RealReal dropped its 2026 Resale Report this week, and the headline number is the kind of thing that should make every fast fashion brand nervous: luxury resale is growing two to three times faster than the primary luxury market. Ninety-three percent of Americans now shop secondhand online, and nearly half of consumers say they’re evaluating a piece’s future resale value before they even buy it new. This means people aren’t just looking at secondhand shopping as thrifting, they’re viewing it as an investment. The generational breakdown is what’s most interesting. Gen Z and Millennials now make up over half of The RealReal’s customer base, and the platform’s most engaged shoppers are opening the app 5.6 times a week. That’s not bargain hunting behavior, that’s the same compulsive-checking pattern you’d expect from a social media app like Tik Tok or Instagram. Resale has fully colonized the part of our brains that used to belong to new-release drops, and if you've been following this roundup, this story isn't new. Week after week, there's a new statistic or headline confirming what we at Cache already know: clothing resale isn't what it used to be. It's the future of fashion. We all remember when shopping secondhand was stigmatized, when it meant settling for "last season" or "deeply discounted." Now, if you're not cycling between Poshmark, The RealReal, Depop (and Cache of course!) to find your next look, you're falling behind.

  

• Influencers Are Done Getting Paid to Promote. Now They Want to Own the Brand: Vogue Business’s latest tracks a shift that’s been building for a while: creators are moving past sponsorship checks and into actual equity stakes in the brands they help grow. Instead of a flat fee for a post, top creators are increasingly negotiating for ownership, meaning their success is now financially tied to whether the brand actually works long-term, not just whether one campaign performs. This flips the power dynamic that’s defined influencer marketing for a decade. Creators used to need brands for opportunities. Now brands need creators for both audience and, increasingly, capital and cultural credibility, especially early-stage labels trying to cut customer acquisition costs without burning through a traditional ad budget. To me, this signals a huge distinction between an “influencer” and creators with actual influence. An equity stake changes the incentive structure completely. Suddenly, a creator isn't just borrowing a brand's credibility for a post. They're betting on their own name, determining whether that brand is actually good, actually lasts, actually deserves the audience they're handing over. That's a much higher bar, and it's not a bad thing if it forces some separation between people cashing checks and people building something real. That distinction is the whole reason Cache exists in the first place. We're not trying to build reach for its own sake, we're trying to build a place where sellers and buyers actually trust each other, because everyone involved genuinely believes in what we're doing here.

• Vintage Isn’t Just Trending, It’s Reshaping What “Luxury” Even Means:

  Buried inside that same Resale Report is a stat that deserves its own headline: gross merchandise value for vintage fashion on The RealReal climbed 432 percent from 2020 through the first half of 2026. Saved searches referencing a specific decade are up 135 percent year over year. Chanel officially displaced Louis Vuitton as the platform’s most-searched brand, with Prada, Gucci, Miu Miu, and The Row rounding out the top five. The RealReal is calling this behavior “quality arbitrage,” the idea that shoppers are chasing natural fibers, older construction, and premium materials that are increasingly hard to find at reasonable prices in new merchandise. It’s a compelling thesis even if the report doesn’t fully back it with hard price comparisons. What’s not up for debate: The RealReal now defines “vintage” as anything 15-plus years old and culturally significant, which means the 2000s officially qualify. Yeah…sit with that for a second. In my opinion, this signals the beginning of the end for fast fashion. Fast fashion labels built their businesses on the ability to mass produce inexpensive, low quality clothing, designed and placed in storefronts within a matter of weeks. It worked perfectly for so long. It was cheap, convenient, and consumers knew that the clothes they were buying were virtually disposable… they just didn’t care. They do now. As retail prices climb and clothing quality worsens, people are finally starting to pay attention to what they’re buying. Raise your hand if you’re sick of seeing a sweater that’s 95% Polyester retail for $200… yeah, me too! Secondhand shopping feels like the only way to find good quality clothing for a reasonable price. The end of fast fashion won't be a single headline, it'll look exactly like this: quietly, one closet at a time.

  

• Vanity Fair Just Relaunched Its Best Dressed List for the First Time This Decade: Vanity Fair brought back its Best Dressed List this week as part of its September Style Issue, and the honoree list is a trail-mix: Teyana Taylor, Jacob Elordi, Louisa Jacobson, Michaela Coel, architect Frida Escobedo, Harry Styles, Paloma Elsesser, Hunter Schafer, painter Anna Weyant, and Colman Domingo make up the primary ten. Beyond that core group, the list splits into categories: perennials for enduring style, professionals for the industry’s own alpha dressers, originals for the most experimental, duos for style pairs, and a “future” category spotlighting rising talent. What’s notable is the range. This isn’t just red carpet regulars. It pulls from entertainment, sports, politics, architecture, and art, which feels like a deliberate answer to the question the issue itself poses: who actually defines American style right now, when the answer used to be so much narrower. The "Originals" category is where Vanity Fair really gave us range: Spike Lee, Rosalía, Björk, and, somehow, Pope Leo XIV, sharing a bucket for having an uncompromising point of view. A sitting Pope being recognized for his outfits alongside a Björk era of feathers and swan dresses is not a sentence I expected to type this week, but here we are. The "Future" category has its own curveball: alongside pop princesses Tyla & Olivia Dean sits Erling Haaland, Norway's young, funny, and outgoing professional soccer player. Maybe this is just a way to capitalize on the athlete’s recent media attention following the World Cup. Or, it’s Vanity Fair betting that athletes are becoming actual style figures in their own right, not just brand ambassadors in a suit for one red carpet a year. Vanity Fair is framing this whole relaunch as a response to a fashion landscape gone flat, years of creative director shuffling, and "quiet luxury" dressing that's made half of the red carpet indistinguishable from the other half. A list built to identify who still has a point of view only works if it's willing to be a little unhinged about who counts. Pope and striker included, this one clearly is.

  

• Chanel Beauty Just Showed Up on Substack, and It’s Smarter Than It Sounds: Chanel Beauty tapped Substack creators, including Erika Veurink and Jess Graves, to promote its new fragrance Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu, This is part of a bigger pattern: Substack has spent this year building out an actual native sponsorship infrastructure, with Balenciaga already signed on as a launch partner back in June alongside brands like Uber and T-Mobile. What makes the Chanel move interesting is the format fit. The fragrance, which is built around nostalgia and personal memory, requires long-form, personal writing to land, which is exactly the muscle Substack creators already have that Instagram captions do not. Beauty brands chasing an algorithm used to mean fifteen-second TikToks. Now, the smart play might be a 1,200-word essay about your mom’s perfume drawer. You know this already. Of every social platform, you chose to spend your time here. Cache is no stranger to what Substack actually offers: the ability to build something that feels like a real community, not just an audience. What makes Substack different comes down to effort. Everyone here is taking the time to articulate an idea, an opinion, an anecdote, hoping it lands with exactly the right person instead of just anyone scrolling past. In a world where every other platform is optimized for the fastest scroll, Substack asks you to slow down, and somehow, that's exactly why it works. That's the same bet we're making with Cache: that people don't actually want more noise, they want somewhere that feels considered. Chanel showing up here isn't proof that Substack has arrived. It's proof that the rest of the internet is finally catching up to something this community already knew.

• The Discount Aisle Just Got a Balance Sheet: A post from Marketing In The Madness put a number on something we’ve all been feeling: Vestiaire Collective, Vinted, and The RealReal are all profitable. And some of them achieved this in under a year. For a long time, resale got treated as retail’s discount rail, something brands tolerated but never actually invested in. Profitability changes that math entirely. It means bigger marketing budgets aimed at shoppers who’ve never touched resale. It means lower commissions, because price is still the number one reason people buy secondhand in the first place. And, it means stable tech teams building the actual shopping experience instead of just firefighting it. Two years ago, brands saw resale as a threat. Now, they’re considering how they should incorporate it. Beyond the impressive headline: Profitable isn't just a good financial headline, it's almost like a permission slip. When you're still burning cash trying to prove the model even works, every move you make is defensive. Cut costs. Chase growth. Survive the next round. But once you're actually profitable, you get to go on offense instead. You get to build an app people already enjoy using instead of trying to prove to people it works. You get to go after the shopper who's never once thought about buying secondhand. You get to walk into a room with a brand and negotiate like you have leverage, because now, you do. That's the real shift here. Not the number itself, but what the number lets you do next. Resale didn't win by being the cheap option. It won by evolving into a business people actually want to run. And Cache can’t wait to be next!

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• Depop taught Gen Z more about running a business than their degree did, and hiring managers actually agree: New research shared exclusively with Fortune found that 71% of Gen Z sellers say online resale taught them more practical business knowledge than their formal education did. And it's not just “kids” talking themselves up: 85% of hiring managers say candidates should be listing resale experience on their resume, and they'd be more likely to interview someone with a Depop or Vinted side hustle over an equally qualified candidate without one. When asked what experience would most impress them in an entry-level candidate, hiring managers ranked resale above traditional internships, retail or hospitality jobs, and social media management. In my opinion, this isn’t surprising at all. As a retired Depop demon, I can confidently attest that reselling your old clothes teaches pricing strategy, negotiation, customer service, budgeting, and marketing. Plus, you get to effectively clear out your closet while making some extra cash in the worst entry-level job market in decades. What's unfortunate is that nearly half of Gen Z sellers didn't even realize this experience counted for anything professionally. I think this demonstrates a genuinely important response to how volatile the job market has gotten. 50 years ago, you probably couldn't get away with "I sold my old clothes" on your resume, but 50 years ago the entry-level job market wasn't exactly the bloodbath it is today. Emboldening new generations to get creative on their own instead of waiting around for an internship acceptance is exactly the solution we need to the paradoxical "experience" equation: applying for roles that are allegedly entry-level but ask for two-plus years of experience anyway. Resale was never just a way to make a little extra money on the side, it's a crash course in entrepreneurship, and now the people doing the hiring are finally saying it out loud. So if you're tired of being one of 500+ applicants on an internship application for a role you don't even want, it might be time to purge your closet, hit the bins, and clear out your phone storage.

  

• Follower count is losing its grip as the metric that actually matters: As brands get better visibility into engagement, conversion and audience quality, the creator with the single biggest following isn't automatically the most valuable one to work with anymore. This tracks with something Instagram's own Adam Mosseri has said publicly: follower counts matter less than view and like counts if you actually want a sense of how relevant an account is. In practice, that means an account with hundreds of thousands of followers but weak engagement per post isn't nearly the asset it used to be, while a smaller, highly engaged niche creator can now book real brand deals on the strength of their actual influence rather than their raw numbers. It's a meaningful shift for anyone building something in fashion or resale content specifically, because it means audience quality and genuine trust with your following are becoming more valuable currency than audience size. Brands are getting smarter about measuring what actually converts, and that's a good thing for creators who've been doing the work without the six-figure follower count to show for it. At Cache, this is exactly what we value. In a world where "influencer" has become an umbrella term for anyone who owns a ring light, we want to be a way to connect consumers with people who actually embody what the word was supposed to mean: people with good taste who you can trust. And we can tell you right now, that's not exactly conducive to follower count. As the influencer market gets more and more saturated, it's inevitable that not everyone survives. The bubble is bound to pop, and the ones who make it out won't necessarily have the most followers, they'll be the ones offering something truly influential.

• J.Crew's archive obsession keeps getting deeper: The retailer just resurrected a handful of its bestselling pieces straight from its own catalogs of the '90s and early 2000s, including the Vintage Daisy print, the Café Capri, and the now-viral 1998 Montauk Tote, which is already selling out. It's part of a broader pattern for J.Crew, which has been steadily building out its relationship with its own history: the brand has been quietly sourcing limited-edition vintage capsules from its '80s and '90s archives for in-store sale since 2023, alongside a resale partnership with ThredUp that lets customers trade in old J.Crew pieces for store credit. Now, with a "coming soon" teaser landing for J.Crew Vintage specifically, it looks like the brand is gearing up to expand that vintage arm even further, and likely with a broader assortment pulled from the archive the design team has spent years quietly building up. It's the same logic driving brand-run resale everywhere right now: if a retailer doesn't sell its own secondhand stock, somebody else profits off it instead. Brands with real archives worth mining are increasingly choosing to cash in on their own history rather than watch it circulate on eBay without them getting a piece of the pie. J.Crew has one of the more legitimately iconic archives in American retail, so this is worth watching closely. This is also yet another example of nostalgia dressing dominating fashion trends. Brands are catching on to consumers who crave a sense of nostalgia, and they're not going to miss out on capitalizing off of it. Don't get me wrong, I love '90s and Y2K fashion, but a small part of me wonders when fashion will start to feel new again (true Cache fans know we’ve been saying this). Maybe that's the real appeal of J.Crew leaning into its actual archive instead of just recycling the aesthetic: there's a difference between a "vintage-inspired" capsule and the literal 1998 Montauk Tote. One's a costume, the other is source material. Until fashion figures out how to feel new again, we'll take the real thing over an imitation of it any day.

  

• Betsey Johnson and Paris Hilton teamed up for Betsey's 84th birthday, and we’re sliving for it: In honor of her 84th birthday this week, Betsey Johnson linked up with Paris Hilton for a collection that is exactly as pink and glittery as you can imagine. The lineup includes a tiered pink party dress (styled on Hilton for the campaign), a "That's Hot!" bedazzled bag, a pink-and-white slip dress, plus a handful of additional mini dresses, handbags, and shoes, all under $200. The brands framed it as a celebration of "two icons who have inspired generations through their unapologetic individuality, love of glamour, and belief that fashion should always be fun.” While I personally couldn’t have predicted this, it's hard to think of a more accurate pairing. Betsey built an entire career on maximalist, campy, joyfully-too-much design in an era when fashion took itself extremely seriously, and Paris Hilton spent the 2000s doing the exact same thing in celebrity form being her unapologetic, unintentionally funny self. Both of them got dismissed as punchlines and then fully vindicated a decade later. What's actually interesting here is the timing: fashion's been cashing in on Y2K nostalgia for years through vintage-inspired capsules and archive reissues (see: J.Crew above). This is different. Betsey Johnson was literally cartwheeling down her own runways in the 2000s. Paris Hilton was the actual blueprint for early-2000s celebrity culture before rebuilding it into a real business. So this isn't two brands borrowing a decade, it's the two people who built it paying homage to their own legacy. They’re not riding the nostalgia wave, they’re reminding people they’re the blueprint.

  

• Michael Kors is taking over Bergdorf Goodman's windows to celebrate 45 years in New York: For his last runway show, Michael Kors staged an elaborate homage to the city he's called his brand’s home for 45 years, taking over the Metropolitan Opera and casting a campaign full of stage and screen names tied to New York, (including Lea Michele, which is huge for my fellow Gleeks). Now that campaign is getting a second life at Bergdorf Goodman, with the department store's iconic Fifth Avenue windows dedicated to the collection and its accompanying imagery. It's a smart, fairly low-key move compared to some of the more chaotic marketing stunts we've been seeing lately, but it's a genuinely well-executed one: pairing a designer whose entire brand identity is tied to New York glamour with the single most recognizable storefront on Fifth Avenue is about as on-the-nose as branding gets, in the best way. It also lands at an interesting moment, right as the city gears up for NYFW, when every legacy American designer is trying to figure out how to feel relevant again without chasing whatever a 25-year-old is doing on TikTok. Kors' answer seems to be leaning all the way into being exactly what he's always been: unapologetically and glamorously New York. Sometimes not reinventing yourself is the move.

• Brands are starting to treat controversy as a genuine marketing strategy, not something to avoid: A new piece from Campaign US makes the case that in an oversaturated attention economy, some brands have basically stopped treating backlash as a crisis and started treating it as a planned campaign variable with its own KPIs. Remember American Eagle's "Great Jeans" campaign with Sydney Sweeney? It sparked a huge wave of online debate over whether the wordplay on "genes," paired with Sweeney's appearance, was subtly invoking ideas about genetic superiority. Whether or not that reading was intentional on the brand's part, the business results speak for themselves: the campaign sold out in days, their stock jumped 25%, and the brand picked up almost a million new customers in about six weeks, all without ever issuing a retraction or apology. One strategist quoted in the piece put it bluntly: brands have stopped treating backlash as an existential threat and started treating it as a manageable event, because getting people to argue, comment, duet, and stitch travels a lot further online than a safe, polished ad ever could. Sorta like that saying, “all press is good press.” It's part of a bigger pattern across fashion this summer, with brands like Adidas, e.l.f., and Swatch all finding themselves at the center of controversies with wildly different outcomes, ranging from a genuine profile boost to real reputational and even legal risk depending on how they responded. What I find a bit uncomfortable about this piece is the implication that some of these controversies might not be accidents anymore, maybe they’re calculated bets that outrage is more profitable than being ignored. It raises a real question for the industry: if courting backlash keeps working financially, what's actually stopping more brands from doing it on purpose, and where does that leave the difference between a brand that's being bold and one that's just perpetuating hate?

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

Devyn here with an exciting update. After a couple months under the knife, we are so back, and with a facelift to show for it.

You can now experience the new and improved Cache app on iOS and Android.

The functionality of the app hasn’t changed, just the look and feel, and since I never properly walked you through the product in the first place, figured now is probably a good time.

On that note, let’s break it down…

TL;DR:

Cache is the destination to shop the internet’s most coveted closets.

We turn influencer closets into storefronts.

• For sellers: We host your closet sale. You hand over your unworn pieces, we turn them into cash, and you build something real with the community that already trusts your taste. We handle everything behind the scenes: cataloging, pricing, listings, authentication, and shipping. Today, we are invite-only but you can apply to secure your spot here.

  ON DEFINING INFLUENCE

  At Cache, influence = taste + trust.

  It is not strictly about follower count. It is a holistic consideration of your platform, your audience, and the overlap of the two. If you’re someone with a closet full of clothes and followers that trust your taste, apply to sell with us.

• For shoppers: Buying from a closet you've followed for years is a different kind of shopping. The piece comes with context: a story you already recognize, a closet you genuinely covet. Shop your favorite (or discover new) tastemakers’ closets on Cache.

1. Browse & Wishlist

The Cache experience begins on the Browse tab. This is where you can view all items for sale across all sellers and all sales. Scroll through, find what you like, and add anything to your wishlist before committing to your purchase. You can also filter by category, size, and color or sort by price.

Every item on the Browse tab also tells you whose piece you’re looking at. That’s part of the magic of shopping with context. More on that in #3 below.

2. Shop by Seller or Sale

Every item sold on Cache is tied to a specific sale (like a “drop” on Supreme) and a specific seller. Sometimes sales go live in connection with a pop-up shopping event, a live sale on Instagram, or both. A sale might feature one seller or several grouped together. Find every live and upcoming drop in the Sales tab, and set reminders for upcoming drops there, too.

Head to the Seller tab to browse individual storefronts on Cache. Follow your favorites to get notified when new items go live.

3. Shop with Context

The magic of Cache is that you’re not just shopping random resale. You’re shopping the actual closets of tastemakers you know, trust, and follow. Sometimes, you also discover new closets upon arrival. Part of that context is what we call Love Notes: a personal touch from our sellers, to you. A way for them to share the story behind each piece, why they’re selling it, the life it’s lived, what makes it special. Each item is more than just a piece with a name on it. It’s a chance to keep something good from collecting dust in a closet and out of a landfill.

4. The “Practical” Stuff

• When you checkout on Cache, items are reserved especially for you for 10 minutes. Complete your purchase in that time or pieces go back in the pool and someone else might scoop them up.

• Your Profile tab is home base. Here, you will find:

  • Order confirmations and shipping status

  • Your wishlist

  • FAQ & customer support

  • Settings: currency, notification preferences, newsletter (hey!)

  • Feedback form, which we genuinely read, appreciate, and love to receive 💚

  • Want to host your own sale? The application form lives on your Profile tab too.

If you’re excited about resale, shopping from the internet’s most coveted closets, or hosting your own closet sale (apply here!)…

Cache is the place for you.

Tell your friends, share your feedback, and be a part of our equivalent of a run club… but for resale. And, if you want the thesis behind all of this, read our previous musings on the parasocial wardrobe:

Finally, if you want to hear me yap about how all of this came to be, listen to my interview with Between Two Brunettes, out today:

Or click here to listen on Spotify ;)

This is just the beginning. If you’re an influencer, tastemaker, or creator, what you see today is only a glimpse. We are building the next phase, laying the groundwork for a future that bridges the gap between social commerce, the creator economy, and resale.

If you want to be the first to know, first to try, or build it with us (we are actively recruiting for a creator-led advisory board), we want to connect. DM me👇 or show your interest by applying here!

Until next time… Cache ya later!

x Devyn

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• Copenhagen Fashion Week just closed out its 20th anniversary season, and it’s still the only fashion week treating sustainability like a floor instead of a marketing angle: 36 shows and presentations over four days, the event’s largest attendance yet, and New York’s Collina Strada got the first-ever International Guest Slot, presenting a one-off runway show. The thing that separates CFW from other fashion weeks is the bureaucratic part: every single brand on that schedule has to hit at least 50% sustainable materials, never destroy unsold stock, and keep runway sets entirely zero-waste, independently audited, not self-reported. 20 years in, and Copenhagen still hasn’t blinked on this. Compare that to basically every other fashion capital, where “sustainability” shows up as a press release adjective and disappears the second it costs a brand a good fabric or an easy set design. Copenhagen made it a cover charge. You don’t get to be on the schedule without it. That’s the difference between a value and a vibe, and it’s the reason Copenhagen keeps punching above its weight despite never having the budgets or the heritage houses that Paris or Milan can lean on. On top of that, I can’t be the only one whose timeline has been flooded with instagram posts, Tik Toks, and headlines saying that Copenhagen Fashion Week is the fashion event to watch. Many say it’s worth a deep dive if you’re especially interested in catching on to streetwear trends before they become mainstream. Kind of iconic of Copenhagen I must say, being a pioneer for trends while refusing to compromise on ethics and values. Something to think about if you’re like me and have always dreamt of attending fashion week… downloading Duolingo and perfecting my Danish as we speak!

  

• Kylie Jenner made a shoe, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of this girl’s portfolio: KHY, Jenner’s clothing label, is making its footwear debut in partnership with Giaborghini, the Italian sandal-maker known for handcrafted, artisan-level construction. Three silhouettes are dropping August 21 at 1pm ET: the Studio Thong, a pony-hair Muse Thong, and a more futuristic club-girl style called the Icon. Pairing with an established Italian manufacturer is a shortcut and it borrows decades of craft reputation in a single collab announcement. This is the same move that brands like The Row and Khaite have used to skip the “prove you can actually make things well” phase entirely. In the same week, Jenner is also fronting a new activewear campaign for Alo, shot by Mert & Marcus, following Bella Hadid’s shoot for the same brand. Why is this worth mentioning? She’s simultaneously the owner of one brand and the paid face of another (well, the face of many), running two completely different business models under one Instagram grid. One’s vertically integrated equity, the other’s a big fat check. Most people scrolling past both posts register them exactly the same way, “oh, Kylie again,” and that collapsing distinction between founder and spokesmodel is worth noting because it's not actually new, it's just gotten harder to see. Ten years ago the "own brand" and the "paid brand" were visually distinct, different aesthetics, different captions, different levels of polish. Now ,they run through the same content pipeline, same photographer roster, same feed, same it-girl-with-abs vibe, and the audience has stopped doing the mental math to separate them. Which raises the actual question worth sitting with: does it matter anymore if a founder is "authentic" to a brand she owns, when the whole point of the influencer-brand model was that the audience trusted her taste in the first place? If Jenner can front Alo with the same conviction she fronts KHY, the "founder" premium starts to look less like proof of vision and more like proof of reach. That's not a knock on her specifically, it's just where the entire influencer-owned fashion category has quietly landed, equity and endorsement collapsing into the same performance of proximity.

  

• John Lewis’s department store boss quit less than three years into the job, and the timing is telling: Quick context for anyone who doesn’t follow UK retail: John Lewis is Britain’s big, beloved, employee-owned department store chain. With 34 stores across the country, it is the closest UK equivalent to a Nordstrom, and famous for its “never knowingly undersold” promise. Peter Ruis, who runs the department store business, is stepping down in September “to pursue new projects,” and he’s leaving days after the company’s chair publicly warned staff of “really tough” trading conditions ahead. He’ll be replaced by Will Kernan who is currently a board member at the same parent partnership. The part that makes this worth a headline instead of a footnote: Ruis just led an £800 million investment and modernization push to shake John Lewis's stuffy, dated reputation, and by most accounts it was actually working: Foot traffic and sentiment both improved on his watch. He's not leaving after a failure. He's leaving in the exact window between a turnaround succeeding and the next few quarters getting hard, which is a very specific window to pick. My take: executive exits are basically a leading indicator if you read them right. People who stick around for the victory lap after a turnaround tend to believe in what's coming next. People who leave the second leadership starts using words like "really tough" out loud usually know something the earnings call hasn't said yet.

  

• Prada posted double-digit revenue growth, and the more interesting number is buried in the fine print: Prada Group’s first-half 2026 revenue rose above 3 billion euros, with adjusted EBIT reaching 530 million euros. This is a refreshingly strong result in a year that most of luxury has spent apologizing for its numbers instead of celebrating them. But management was clear that Prada’s growth came more from mix than price, while Miu Miu’s once-eye-popping growth is now settling into something more normalized. Translation for those of us who don’t speak earnings-call? The thing that made Miu Miu the industry’s obsession for the last two years, that “wait, everyone actually wants this” vibe is cooling into a steady, mature growth line instead of a hockey stick. That's not a bad thing. Brands aren't supposed to grow at hockey-stick speed forever, but it does mean the discourse is about to shift away from Miu Miu whether the brand likes it or not. The one actually worth watching is Versace, which executives described as entering a long creative reset under Prada's ownership. "Long creative reset" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. Tt's the corporate way of saying give us time, we know this brand has been coasting since the Capri years. My personal takeaway: Versace is about to become luxury's most interesting glow-up story over the next two years, and right now it's flying under the radar because Miu Miu is still hogging the spotlight. Which is honestly the best position a turnaround can be in, where no one’s paying enough attention to criticize your rough drafts.

  

• i-D is getting a new editor-in-chief, and the succession plan is the most normal thing about magazine media right now: Thom Bettridge is stepping down as i-D’s editor-in-chief to focus on his own creative studio, Content World, and global editorial director Steff Yotka is taking over. Yotka’s background runs through Style.com, Vogue, and a stint running content at SSENSE, so this isn’t a stretch hire. It’s an internal promotion for someone who already knows where the bodies are buried. She’s been sitting one seat over from Bettridge this whole time. Bettridge also oversaw i-D’s print relaunch after a five-year hiatus, leaning hard into rising, semi-unknown faces on the covers instead of the usual A-list roulette, and it mostly paid off. This isn’t a brand in crisis handing off to whoever’s available, it’s a brand mid-momentum choosing continuity. No leadership vacuum, no outside hire parachuting in to “reimagine the brand” six months in. Compare that to the last few years of magazine media, which has felt like one long game of musical chairs. Wintour’s own shift to a global role, editors bouncing between Condé titles, entire mastheads getting gutted overnight. A quiet, competent succession reads as a refreshing plot twist here.

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

A Shopaholic’s Crisis of Faith

You know when you stare at your closet and suddenly hate absolutely everything you own. The top you bought on a whim last week doesn’t fit the same way it did in store and despite being an online shopping addict, none of the packages that show up at your door can fill the void. Something is missing. Something is wrong. And it isn’t just about the clothes.

I can pinpoint the exact moment five months ago when I had a bit of an identity crisis. Identity crisis may be extreme, but more or less, I found myself introspectively judging my consumption habits and how they related to my taste. I love fashion. I always have. In fact, if you asked me at 6 years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you I was going to be a designer and showed you my sketches. Even as I grew up and decided being a designer was not the most practical career choice, I still found myself drawn to this industry. I mean look at me now—I’m pursuing a degree that has nothing to do with fashion (fellow Stats & Data Science majors rise up) but spending my free time here: Writing pieces about various corners of the fashion industry, hoping to build a community, and contributing to a brand that I’m deeply passionate about.

But for someone who is a self proclaimed fashion lover, I started to feel imposter syndrome. I started to question whether I was simply admiring objectively beautiful things like the archival runway pieces sprinkled across my instagram and Pinterest feeds, or if I genuinely had taste. Am I a follower of trends, or do I have the ability to determine whether I like something and why I like it? Am I actively choosing my clothes, or is my algorithm handing me the same trends it’s handing every other “fashion girl”? Do I have taste? Or do I just love shopping?

The Commitment Economy

I stumbled across a TikTok last week that really stuck with me, especially as I was navigating this battle with my closet. The video talked about how modern society’s consumption habits have created a system in which we, as consumers, hardly have to make commitments anymore. I’ll give you an example. The average music listener will open up Spotify or Apple Music (which app wins is a debate for another time). They’ll then have the opportunity to select any song from any album by any artist—and if they have a change of heart, they can just skip it and play whatever else. Contrast this to the way people would consume media 50 years ago. You’d have to commit to buying a CD, or a record for your record player, or a cassette tape, or however they used to do it… idk I wasn’t alive back then. But the point is, the album, artist, and song you listened to meant making a choice. It was a commitment to your taste, and by extension, a commitment to your identity.

My first thought was to think about this in the context of fashion. There’s no doubt the way we define, measure, and develop taste has radically changed within the last 20, 10, or even 5 years. Today, we are flooded with fashion content. The same way you have the freedom to open Spotify and listen to anything, you open virtually any social media platform and have access to a buffet of microtrends, viral videos, ootds, and online brands. More importantly, the barrier of entry to participate in any one of these trends is extremely low thanks to the dupe economy and fast fashion. People don’t have to think about it anymore. Buying that viral top or hot new accessory doesn’t require much convincing when all it takes is a TikTok, a ShopMy link, $50-$100 max, and fast and free shipping. It doesn’t require choice. It doesn’t require commitment. Which brings me back to the question I couldn't shake: If I'm not being forced to choose, am I actually building taste, or just accumulating things I've never had to defend? Things everyone else is buying then posting on Instagram then looking at with distaste in just a few weeks’ time.

So the answer is buying stuff that less people can access… right?

The natural overcorrection to this conundrum is to assume that the only way to separate oneself from the sea of microtrends is to seek things that are harder to buy. Things that are exclusive. Things that are rare. And what screams exclusive more than highly coveted luxury fashion? Fashion you need a purchasing history and an exclusive relationship with a sales associate to get your hands on. Right??? WRONG.

Something I’m even more sick of seeing on social media than fast fashion fads? Logo dressing that is considered taste. I used to look at luxury fashion as the gold standard for dressing. The bags I’d grown up seeing my mom wear, the red-bottomed heels I’d gaze at through department store window displays, the unrealistic wishlist I’ve accumulated of things I’ll buy when I start making “big-girl” money. Don’t get me wrong, I have immense respect and admiration for the classic and undeniably important luxury houses that have and always will be the crown jewels of the fashion industry. And I do still love luxury fashion and hope to invest in pieces of my own some day. That said, when it comes to the topic of taste, I can’t help but feel like sometimes the appeal for these items comes less from them being a true reflection of one’s style and more-so a status symbol meant to say “I’m better than you” to everyone else. So no… luxury and exclusivity does not automatically equal taste. And as I navigate what taste means to me, I’ve found myself re-evaluating whether I even really like a luxury item, or if I just like it because I know it’s expensive and so does everyone else. Is the Hermes Mini Kelly even cute? Or does it just have an intentional, yet invisible price tag attached to it for everyone to notice.

The Existential Crisis Continues…

Great! So now my introspective thinking has snowballed into this downward spiral. I still don’t know whether I have taste, I no longer enjoy luxury fashion the way I used to, I still hate everything in my closet, and on top of it all I am so overly conscious about my consumption habits that I don’t even want to online shop my sorrows away. Oh ,and don’t forget the imposter syndrome, that’s still here too. So if overconsumption and following microtrends doesn’t mean you have taste and being draped in head to toe Chanel doesn’t either… what does? What’s the answer? How do I appreciate fashion content but ensure my purchasing habits are a true reflection of my choice, my commitment? How do I dress in a way thats authentic and unique to me without buying my way into exclusivity?

The answer… kinda

I’ve done a lot of thinking, purged my closet, and I’m three weeks sober from online shopping (wondering if the UPS guy is worried about me). All to arrive at this answer: taste is ethical, controlled, and thoughtful consumption that doesn’t need to be expensive to be exclusive. It’s investing in pieces that you actually had to work for, pieces that made you dig, wait, second-guess yourself, and choose anyway. It’s not about the size of your closet or the size of the price tag, it’s about whether you can look at every single thing hanging in there and tell me why it’s yours.

In true Cache fashion, secondhand shopping happens to be the easiest place to practice this, not because it’s trendy or sustainable (though, sure, it’s both), but because it still makes you work for it. You can’t just search “y2k mini skirt” and have 40 identical options shipped to you in two days. You have to dig, you might come up empty, and you have to actually decide, in the moment, whether something is you. If something pops up on your fyp that peaks your interest, you have to spend time scouring the internet to source it. It’s friction by design. It’s the opposite of everything fast fashion has trained us to expect from shopping. It’s more than buying clothes, it’s buying a story. It’s rummaging through racks of old prom dresses to find cashmere 50% off and being excited to tell people that when they ask where you bought. Of course, secondhand is not the only way to achieve this. There’s boutique shopping, small batch brands, and one-of-a-kind labels that take the same amount of due diligence to find. And those matter just as much.

As far as I’m concerned, I still don’t fully know if I have taste. But I know now that the question was never “do I like beautiful things?” Everyone likes beautiful things. That’s not a personality. The question is whether I’m willing to do the work to choose them. And I can confidently say the 6 year old aspirational designer in me would be proud that I am. It turns out taste was never about what’s in your closet. It’s about whether you had to commit to get it there.

I hope you enjoyed this read! Until next time ;)

xoxo Yasmeen 💚

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• Boutique shopping is having a moment, and the funeral for online shopping might be premature but it’s coming

  Remember when online shopping felt like the whole future and brick-and-mortar was supposedly dying? Yeah, that's reversing. Vogue's confirming what we've all been feeling, a string of the stores that used to define "cool place to shop in person" (Opening Ceremony, Totokaelo, Barneys, the kind of names that made a trip to the store feel like an event) all shut down within basically the same stretch, leaving a discovery-shaped hole that boutiques are stepping back in to fill. So let’s talk boutiques. Mess in the West Village has zero e-commerce and no plans to ever build any. Bomi lives on the second floor of a SoHo building, with no street entrance so you have to buzz in…and that's not a logistics problem, it’s the allure of the place. To many, this shift doesn’t come as a surprise. People have been saying for a while that the algorithm was going to eat itself, and Ssense going bankrupt kind of proves it. When every site is running the same 80% off sale on the same rotating inventory, shopping stops being a discovery and starts being a scroll. There's nothing to find when everything's already been found for you, and this is what’s turning people off of online shopping. That’s what I find interesting about all of this. Consumers have this new desire to make shopping harder on purpose. For a while everyone was happy that shopping was so easy. You could open up your phone and have access to virtually any store, and their entire inventory. When everyone has this same access, everyone starts to shop the same. Enter the boutique. Finding a good boutique is like finding vintage Chanel buried in a random consignment store between someone's old prom dresses — you weren't expecting anything, you were mostly killing time, and the second you spot it you get weirdly protective, like the store doesn't even deserve to know what it has. That's what a good boutique is now. Not a discount. A find. And you don't post it until you're ready to share.

  

• Reformation went public this week and the market’s reaction tells you everything about where fashion investing’s head is at right now

  The brand raised $211 million, landed an $886M valuation, and priced flat at the bottom of its range — on a day US consumer retail IPOs are sitting at their lowest point in a decade. And the read from analysts is blunt: it’s not the sustainability story carrying this anymore, it’s 20 straight quarters of double-digit revenue growth. IPOX’s Kat Liu didn’t sugarcoat it: sustainability can no longer compensate for weak fundamentals. For those of us who want to see sustainable fashion dominating the industry, this kinda stings. Reformation made “sustainable” feel aspirational instead of preachy, cute enough that you’d wear it even if you didn’t personally care about the planet, and that was the whole trick of the brand. Now the market's saying this: the sustainability angle didn't sell the clothes, it sold a story, and that story only worked because investors were rewarding ESG narratives, not because customers were buying dresses for the planet. Personally, I don’t think this is a Reformation failure specifically — I think it’s an industry-wide correction. We spent five-ish years where every brand needed an ESG slide in the pitch deck to get funded, and now investors want to see the actual business behind the moodboard. Watch other DTC darlings quietly soften their sustainability messaging in investor materials while keeping it front-and-center for customers. We’re going to see two different pitches for two different audiences. Always been true. Just harder to hide now that it's happening on the NYSE, in public, in real time.

• Zara, H&M, and Levi’s all suddenly want a piece of the $393 billion resale pie they spent years pretending didn’t threaten them

  Pacsun expanded its PS Vintage resale concept to 16 US locations and its top-performing stores hit a 20% sell-through rate within weeks. H&M says it’s expanding secondhand access “across brands and markets.” The fast fashion establishment has officially stopped fighting resale and started trying to own a slice of it instead. This is the industry finally admitting what Depop-era shoppers have known forever: secondhand was never actually competing against buying new, it was competing against boredom. People don’t resale-shop instead of shopping new, they resale-shop because the thrill of finding something feels different than the algorithm handing it to you on a platter (see: story one, are we sensing a theme this week or what?). Fast fashion brands trying to own that thrill in-house is a little like a casino installing a “please gamble responsibly” hotline in the lobby — not wrong exactly, just a little rich given who’s asking. The sell-through number is the real tell here though. 20% in a matter of weeks is very strong for retail, and it means customers want the resale option straight from the brand, they just needed someone to make it convenient. This is where I get skeptical. Can a brand built entirely on churn and 72-hour trend cycles actually build a credible secondhand arm without it just becoming a clearance rack pretending to be curated? Real resale culture has a story attached to every single piece. Corporate resale feels like inventory management with better branding slapped on top, and that’s not what makes secondhand shopping valuable to me. And I’m willing to bet many others share that sentiment. Want to find real secondhand pieces from real people with real stories behind them? Try Cache, we won’t let you down but Zara always will.

• SKIMS is headed to India, and the ribbon-cutting is not actually the interesting part of this story

  Kim Kardashian’s shapewear empire signed an exclusive deal with Reliance Brands this week to open its first India stores in Delhi and Mumbai, following recent launches in London and Dubai, with Hong Kong and Seoul next on the list. This is SKIMS doing what SKIMS does best — treating global expansion like a victory lap, and as much as I hate to admit it they really know what they’re doing. India’s shapewear market alone is projected to roughly double by 2033, and Reliance already operates over 1,855 retail doors across the country, so the infrastructure’s built and waiting. But Isha Ambani’s quote about the brand speaking to “a new generation of Indian consumers” is where it gets interesting, because SKIMS isn’t walking into an empty market. Homegrown D2C shapewear brands have been building trust and product-market fit there for years without a Kardashian attached to the launch. The actual story here isn’t the store openings, it’s whether global scale and a famous name will beat local brands with years of earned loyalty already in the bank. And it's not like SKIMS is subtle competition — they’re a brand that's basically achieved 'shapewear' as a category name the way Kleenex did for tissues and Chapstick did for lip-balm. Meanwhile brands like Underneat have spent years figuring out fit for actual Indian bodies and price points, not just translating a US size chart and calling it international expansion. This is basically the boutique-versus-algorithm fight from earlier in this roundup, just wearing a different outfit: does the brand with the most reach win, or does the brand that actually gets its customer win? We’ll be watching the comment sections on this one more than the press release.

• Cache is hiring!!!!!! This is the part of the newsletter where we talk about ourselves for a second:

  We’re looking for two people to help us build the future of resale — a Social Media and Content Intern to own our day-to-day on IG and TikTok (hooks, captions, scripts, filming, editing), and a Design Intern to shape how Cache actually looks across every channel, from social graphics to internal assets, no hand-holding required, your ideas included. Both roles are unpaid but available for academic credit with the opportunity to turn into paid roles in the future. So if you’re that chronically online friend with an eye for aesthetics or the one with a camera roll that’s 90% screenshot inspo and 10% actual photos of yourself, this is basically a job description of your personality. Full JDs and how to apply here.

  As a current Cache intern myself, I can’t quantify how awesome this experience has been. I’ve always felt like I’ve been an outsider looking in when it comes the fashion industry. Since joining this team, I’ve finally feel like I’m a part of the world I’ve admired for so long. And more importantly I’m surrounded by a team that shares the same passion for fashion, resale, and community building that I do. Don’t miss out on this opportunity and apply! You won’t regret it ;)

xoxo Yasmeen, Substack & Editorial Content Intern

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

This newsletter might look a little different (and I couldn’t be more excited about it). Until recently, I was using this monthly update to provide the latest on Cache—what we are working on, learned, reading, etc. After 45 newsletters in the same format, I found myself becoming less and less motivated to sit down and draft it. Not because I don’t love sharing what’s going on, or because it has become a chore, but more so because I found myself collecting so many thoughts, articles, products, etc., and I could not find a way to fit them into this “structure” that I had decided was set in stone. Instead, I would force myself to spit out the formula at the expense of what I actually felt compelled to write about, telling myself that I had a machine that worked, we were 45 issues in, and why ruin a good thing.

Well today, I am officially “ruining” that good thing. And in doing so, what I have realized is that I am actually not ruining anything at all. I am fixing what’s no longer working for me. And by virtue of doing so, I am giving myself permission to invite change into my life and routine where, little by little, I remember that change is not destruction. It is redirection.

It’s like this 1967 cartoon by Sam Gross, which shows a man mistakenly believing he is locked inside a prison cell. In reality, the sides of the box are open. It is an image referenced in one of my favourite books of all time, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.

Somehow, I had become that man (my own warden, if you will, which BTW is something I am realllllly good at), confined within a space meant for creativity and freedom. So here I am, putting on my vintage Manolos and stepping out the open sides, reclaiming this forum as one that lends itself to originality, unpredictability, structureless sharing. Without further ado, my brain, in short, this last month…

But first… a little 🔌 to sell with Cache 💚

Are you a Substack-er with an engaged, loyal audience? Or maybe your community lives on IG, TikTok, or YouTube. If this sounds like you, and your closet is full of pieces ready for a second life, call us.

Cache turns closets into connection. Let us host your closet sale so you can turn your unworn clothes into cash and an opportunity to build community. It’s like a run club… for your closet. ;)

Apply to sell with us today or reach out to me () for more info!

Hot take: vintage shopping in Paris is overhyped. Hear me out. I was recently in Paris for the first time in 4ish years. Like every city I go to, I arrive with a Google map full of pins, ready to shop the city’s best vintage, thrift, consignment, you name it. Even before touching down, if you pulled up my map, you would be staring at a very messy sea of red dots. Paris is overflowing with vintage. But what I experienced upon arrival was beyond “overflow”. Let me explain:

1. Le Marais has always been known as one of the best shopping jaunts of all the arrondissements. I mosied on over (in the 100 degree heat wave no less), prepared to start at one “red dot” and bop and weave through the rest of ‘em. It soon became clear that any attempt to plan a curated itinerary was a lost cause. When I tell you that every other shop in Le Marais has become a vintage store, I am underselling. It is easier to buy vintage Cavalli than it is to buy a bottle of water. And trust me, I know, because I lost feeling in my left hand à la dehydration (but hey, in the name of vintage, so… worth it). If I had more time, I would have run a Gallup style poll to understand the ratio of firsthand to secondhand stores in the area. I would not be surprised if we are almost at a point where we have reached parity and come a few years, vintage might even overtake retail in this hood. You heard it here first… (@Kalshi @).

2. On the topic of vintage Cavalli, let’s talk about the inventory. As I dragged my (very loving and very patient) boyfriend in and out of every store, one became indistinguishable from the next. Not because they looked the same, but because it was as if every reseller had gone to the same “wholesale” depot to purchase the same Cavalli jeans and y2k garb. It was shocking. Part of shopping vintage is the thrill of finding something that no one else has; going through that internal battle of “well, if I don’t purchase it, I may never see it again.” It is that precise nagging feeling which either leads to a transaction, or the forever ache of knowing you left a piece behind. While I am thrilled for the sake of the planet and the industry—we are at a point where secondhand has become the first choice for many—the sea of sameness from store to store left me wondering if we are starting to dilute the “thrill of the hunt” which makes shopping secondhand so special.

3. So there’s that, and then there’s the fact that everything is overpriced. And I don’t just say this as a girl suffering from the CAD:EUR exchange rate. Walk into a store in Marseille (where I had been just days prior), and you could find Cavalli jeans for 80-150 Euros. Head to Le Marais and not only will you find those same jeans at a starting price of 300 Euros, but you will also find those same jeans, store after store, for not a dime cheaper. And it is not only the vintage Cavalli. At one store, I stumbled upon a vintage silk Alberta Feretti blouse that I own (and brought with me on the trip). The price tag? 250 Euros. In Toronto, at a local boutique (s/o Smoking Vintage), I bought the blouse AND the matching skirt for a combined ~$200 CAD. Case in point. I understand that cities like Paris and New York come with a markup for curation and access. But if you’re someone that wants a good deal, and/or knows what they’re doing, paying that premium feels like a turnoff.

4. So what’s the takeaway here? Am I done with Paris vintage shopping? Of course not. You (I) cannot blacklist a fashion capital, and the truth is, these observations are a good sign. Plus, I will forever bop and weave in pursuit of great finds—overpriced, overflowing with sameness, or not. However, what I have concluded is the following:

   1. Paris is great if you are looking to source something special, and for which you are willing to dole out a pretty penny. For example, to source a specific bag, wedding outfit, fur coat, etc.

   2. There are still some gems to be found, whether at the flea markets (beware of fakes) or spots like Bobby, where your eye and patience will reward you. Plus, bargaining is welcome.

   3. If you are someone who just loves to be in the presence of secondhand and would prefer to spend your day in and out of vintage stores vs. eating croissants (or shopping vintage while eating croissants), Paris will keep you busy. For days.

   4. If you looking for the best inventory at the best prices, you are better off turning to unsaturated markets. Marseille and Toronto, for example, are totally overlooked IMO (let me know if you would be interested in a separate post about either).

   5. Shockingly, some of the best secondhand I experienced was actually at the department store, Galeries Lafayatte. Half a floor is dedicated to housing six resellers’ inventory at incredible prices (a big win for the market). Not to mention, you also get the benefit of other Department Store level perks. It’s an unexpected goldmine and not to be missed.

Arizona State University (ASU) just launched a degree in “Content Creation” and Emcee Studios is the Soho House for the creator economy. When asked what do you want to be when you grow up?, the answer used to be simple: somewhere between a doctor and an actress, an astronaut and a lawyer. Now, there’s a new (and widely acceptable) answer on the table: An influencer. So, ASU is cashing in. For ~$150 grand, you can officially get a bachelor’s degree in Content Creation and learn the business behind partnerships, viral videos, and how to build a personal brand. This, plus Emcee Studios betting on physical space as a necessary pillar of the creator economy, turning an IRL HQ in Tribeca into a destination for creators to connect with brands, create content, host events, and rent clothing. It’s clear that we are well on our way to a $500B creator economy by 2027. We’re here to make sure every creator, influencer, and tastemaker can turn their closets into another revenue revenue stream and opportunity to connect with fans and followers.

I am regulating my nervous system one vagus nerve pulse and Kabbalah course at a time. Your girl is on a journey of finding calm from within, and part of that has been introducing new systems into the routine. For instance, I have started using a device called Pulsetto daily to stimulate the vagus nerve.

What that actually looks like is using this neck hardware for six minutes, morning and night, as a way to create active pause, meditation, and hopefully, some body rewiring. An attempt to reacclimatize to a way of being that feels more grounded. We are ten days in but I am pleased to report that it seems to be making a difference so far.

Meanwhile, on the Kabbalah front, an advisor (s/o ) suggested that I tune into this course on unlocking abundance. Whether or not you subscribe to the world of Kabbalah, this two hours was time well spent. Yet again, the theme seems to be around making room for active pause, reflection, introspection, and exploration. In this case, introducing those practices into an area of my life that often plagues me (fundraising). If you’re even the slightest bit intrigued, it is literally $1 to try, and might just leave you with some things to think about.

All of this, and a newfound commitment to calendar blocking, for real. This means days dedicated to heads down focus time, workouts scheduled, meals mandated (yes, this actually helps ensure I don’t go a full work day without eating until 4 PM), and my to do list time blocked. Exhibit A below:

Some things that recently inspired me: The Versace retrospective at Musée Maillol and Emma Chamberlain on Emma Grede’s podcast. If you are in Paris this summer you must to indulge in the colorful world of Gianni Versace at this incredible retrospective. The exhibit is such a treat, and I am confident that it would please even the non-fashion-obsessed among us. The show tracks the career of a true visionary whose art is in a class of its own. From the invention of the supermodel to the interpretation of religion, Gianni Versace’s way of combining fashion with form in the shape of celebrity, culture, and expert craft is a sight to behold.

This was my first time listening to Emma Grede’s pod (shocking, I know), and I get the hype. I’ve watched Emma Chamberlain since her early days on YouTube, and I’ll admit—I initially lamented her shift into podcasting, coffee, and Vogue red carpet hosting. Like a lot of people, I craved the YouTube content we’d come to know and love. But Grede’s podcast helped me see that transition not just as a smart career move, but as the natural evolution of a teenager into a twenty-something who happened to be doing it in public (subject to the kind of voyeuristic scrutiny I, too, was guilty of dishing out).

Listening to Emma speak about those decisions—navigating the throes of founder-life while being a “celebrity”, stepping back from a podcast that she had done hundreds of episodes for, navigating the balance of public vs. private life—reminded me why I loved her in the first place. She is articulate, honest, refreshing, grounded, and relatable: a founder, a girl going through it, a twenty-something, a person just like the rest of us. Millions of followers and all. See for yourself:

Finally, a few things in my cart / closet as of late that are bringing me joy:

1. Purchased: This chunky beaded necklace from the market in Morocco.

2. Purchased: My new Charvet slippers in royal blue (I agonized over what color to get, to the point where I had sleep on the decision and come back 24h later. Confirmed, I made the right choice.)

3. Aching over: This YSL vintage necklace that I unfortunately did not purchase (see: comment earlier about the haunting that is vintage pieces left behind).

4. Saved for later: These travel mugs that I thought were cool as a substitute for mugs in your home (especially as someone with shaky hands, prone to spilling).

5. In my cart: These aqua Tkees which, unlike the OG styles that are leather or fabric, are actually meant for getting wet. PSA: I walked 20,000 steps in my shiny Tkees in Paris, in 100 degree heat, and barely blistered.

Parting thoughts, for those that made it this far…

• For those who do like structure and predictability, fear not - we are still continuing our weekly roundup of the latest fashion, tech, and resale news in our Friday series, Cache Flow!

• We are hiring! More news on this in Friday’s Cache Flow, but we are looking for (1) Social Media & Content Intern and (1) Design Intern to join our team this Fall. This is for the girl constantly sending memes to the group chat or the girl that has a camera roll full of screenshot inspo. If this sounds like you, or someone you know, hit us up at careers@cacheinyourcloset.com! NGL, we are a good time…

• Some events worth keeping on your radar:

  • August 8: Vintage Designer Pop-Up - Seven Moods NYC on Tour (Detroit, in person, s/o )

  • August 8-9: Thx It’s Thrifted x The Lucky Flea (NYC, in person)

  • August 22-23: Thx It’s Thrifted x The Lucky Flea (NYC, in person)

  • September 26-27: Toronto Vintage Show (Toronto, in person)

Until next time… Cache ya later!

x Devyn

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Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• AI shopping just arrived on your favorite brand’s actual website:

  , the AI shopping app that launched last year as its own standalone destination, just evolved into something super important. Instead of asking you to download yet another app and set up yet another account, it’s embedding itself directly into brand websites including Alice + Olivia, Staud, and Mansur Gavriel through a “Shop with AI” button. Here’s how it works: you type in something like “chic but sexy but also comfy yet unique LBD” and it actually gets it. No more scrolling through 47 identical black dresses hoping one of them has pockets or the right neckline. The founders admit the biggest hurdle isn’t the technology, it’s unlearning practically three decades of keyword-search habits, which says a lot about how behind online shopping has been this whole time. In my opinion, this is more than just your average sales optimization tactic, this is data mining dressed up in a cute UI. Brands are realizing that tools like Daydream are the missing piece they’ve been needing to truly understand their customer: One brand saw customers consistently asking for shoes even though shoes made up just 4% of their catalog. Alice + Olivia keeps getting requests for a discontinued line they might now bring back. So this isn’t just a styling tool. It’s a confessional booth disguised as a search bar where every “vibe” you describe is an essential data point. Convenient? Yes. A little dystopian that Alice + Olivia has insight to my weekend plans when I shop? Maybe.

  

• Liberty London is betting big on sewing, and Gen Z brought the machine:

  The iconic London department store just doubled the size of its fabrics department and is rolling out crafting classes this fall; riding a very real, very online sewing renaissance that’s been building momentum for a while now. This isn’t your grandma’s hobby anymore. Social media has turned garment-making into a legitimate creative flex, and there’s data to back this up. Etsy’s own trend forecasting points to visible mending going mainstream, bold asymmetrical patchwork graduating from quilts to actual garments, and an appetite among younger sewists for beginner-friendly, fluid silhouettes (like palazzo pants and gathered midi skirts) that don’t require years of technical training to pull off.

  What’s super interesting is the timing. This is happening at the exact moment fast fashion brands are being policed across Europe for producing disposable clothing at record speed, and the response from an entire generation raised on that disposability is to learn to make the thing themselves….that’s kind of badass?? It also happens to be a very logical rebellion. When Shein can push out a trend cycle in 72 hours, the only power move left on the table is making something a machine can’t replicate or restock. A hand-sewn patchwork skirt with visible stitching isn’t a flaw anymore. It’s proof of labor that nobody can dupe, screenshot, or ship overnight.

• Old Hermès bags are outselling new ones, changing the status symbol forever: Buried in this luxury resale report is a very fascinating cultural shift happening in real time. Front rows this season were full of old Kellys, old Constances, and old box leather—the kind of bags that have clearly lived a life. This, while resale premiums on newer bags have actually softened from 2.2x retail back in 2022 down to around 1.4x by late last year. At the same time, average or worn configurations are losing their premium entirely, while pristine vintage pieces in the right leather and color are holding strong. The report even points to Jane Birkin’s own shipwrecked prototype selling for 8.6 million euros as the extreme version of this logic. A bag that looks like it has actually lived life says something a store-fresh bag never could. It gives it an irreplaceable character, something that couldn’t be duped no matter how hard you tried. And isn’t that what exclusivity is all about? Something that can’t be replicated? For years, secondhand was framed as a compromise, the thing you settled for when the sales associate gods weren’t on your side or didn’t want to pay full retail. Now the waitlist bag is starting to look like the boring, try-hard choice, and the beat-up vintage Kelly with an actual story and some real patina is the status symbol everyone’s chasing instead. This is the shift we need: Maintaining respect for the true value of luxury fashion—artisanal craftsmanship, longstanding history and cultural significance—without giving brands too much power. This also shows that brands like Cache are right where they need to be, living in a time where resale isn’t the second choice, it’s the goal.

• ThredUp quietly built a Poshmark competitor inside its own app: ThredUp launched a peer-to-peer marketplace feature that lets sellers list items directly to buyers, essentially cutting out the consignment middleman model the entire company was originally built on. They’re pitting themselves against Poshmark, Depop, and Mercari, and it’s happening at a moment when resale downloads are surging across the board. Tariff-driven price consciousness is pushing even non-Gen-Z shoppers into secondhand for the first time. I mean even my own mom, someone who’s been in a longterm, exclusive relationship with her sales associates, now sees the value in designer resale and has started to explore the space. What this really signals is ThredUp finally admitting that curated consignment and scrappy peer-to-peer reselling were never actually competitors. They were just two exits off the same highway that the company spent years pretending led to different destinations. Consolidation is coming for resale the exact same way it came for streaming a few years back, where everyone eventually collapses into two or three platforms doing everything under one roof. Honestly, I’d rather have one app doing peer-to-peer, consignment, and curation all reasonably well than keep juggling five separate apps and five separate logins just to find one good vintage slip dress. In fact, I’d even argue that Cache has mastered this at a small, intimate, and community driven scale!

• Fashion is rediscovering its appetite for chaos, and quiet luxury did not survive the transition: Trend forecasters are calling it “Club Girl Revival,” a nostalgic pull back toward mid-2010s, 2016-era party girl energy defined by embracing the mess instead of curating it to death. Think rising hemlines, metallics back in full force, and hair and makeup that looks deliberately imperfect. Basically, the total opposite of the clean girl and quiet luxury moods that have dominated every For You page the last few years. It’s already showing up on the runways too, with Gucci leaning into bodycon silhouettes and stilettos and 7 For All Mankind embracing hi-low hemlines and satin minidresses for Fall/Winter. I know we’re all quietly hoping for a Valentino rock-stud shoe revival. Forecasters are describing it as fashion “slipping, almost rebelliously, out of an era defined by restraint,” which is a very fancy way of saying we are so bored of capsule wardrobes! Honestly, we called this one. Quiet luxury was never going to be a permanent personality. It was a predictively timed moment dressed up like a philosophy, and we know that all good things come to an end eventually, no matter how many beige matching sets try to convince you otherwise. The whole clubbing aesthetic is the natural correction to years of restrained, monochrome, doesn’t-want-to-be-perceived dressing, and honestly, thank god. Nobody actually wants to keep trying this hard to look like they’re not trying at all.

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

Today, Amanda is zooming out to look at the bigger picture. She's tracing how consumer habits around fashion have evolved since the rise of the digital world, from the slower, more insular pace of print media to the instant, data-driven, algorithm-fed shopping experience we live in now. It's a piece about what we gained with all this access and speed, and more importantly, what we quietly lost along the way.

Here at , we believe style is an ongoing process rooted in psychology. It’s deeply subjective, and it can’t be reduced to simply buying into the latest trends.

It Tastes Like Data

Like everyone else watching Ryan Murphy’s Love Story in March, I was enamored with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s style. But what stood out wasn’t the cool-girl aesthetic of working at Calvin Klein, 90s nostalgia, or the never-ending drama, but more specifically, the sartorial choices. The precise moment when Carolyn is getting her nails done at the salon and we (the viewer) notice a single band on her ring finger. What stood out most about this moment was that it would never happen today. Not when each finger could be adorned with rings and her wrist could be stacked with Cartier bracelets to compliment an expensive designer watch.

Today’s television is hyper-focused on shop-ability. More is more and brands are doing everything in their power to make us want it. A simple reddit search will confirm what was worn in an episode of Nobody Wants This or Beef. I know this because my husband will often google things like: What jacket was Tom Hardy wearing in Dunkirk? or What brand of eyeglasses did Ryan Gosling have on in Project Hail Mary? The Internet always delivers.

Online shopping has become a treasure trove of data, a place to determine trends (macro and micro) in style, colour, design, detail, marketing, social, etc. Companies are not only fighting for attention but have also become hyper-fixated on data to inform their next steps. They rely on numbers to decide what styles to add to a collection in the hopes that they might grab the finite attention of a customer. For brands, the heavy reliance on data can begin to erode taste and misguide a brand’s internal design compass; their North Star to maintain authenticity, developed over years of trial and error. Not aggregated data. While it is beneficial to have access to data, it is easy to get lost due to the sheer volume available.

Data collection has solved some problems within the fashion industry, it has curbed [some] over-manufacturing and offered small designers a means for selling made to order batches of clothing instead of having to order multiple size runs at one time. It makes business decisions more efficient and gives a buyer or merchandiser historical context to plan seasons effectively. When used in moderation, data can help make choices more streamlined. However, it should not replace gut instinct built through time, lived experience, and trial and error.

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s style didn’t evolve from following trends or an algorithm. It developed through building the intuition for how she wanted to show up in the world. This is why Love Story was aptly timed. It bridged the gap between viewers who lived through the 90s, offering a nostalgic reminder of youthful abandon (pre-cellphone) and a younger generation that romanticizes a time before social media and chronicling daily life through TikTok.

Purism Design Aesthetic

Context is key when reviewing the fashion of any decade. 1987 was marked by the stock market crash. It demolished the wave of opulent times and “greed as good” mentality in favour of simplicity and underscoring the purism movement of the 1990s. This event reflected the consumer sentiment moving into the next decade, where people needed to reassess their spending habits and simplify their lives. No single fashion movement occupied the entire decade. Instead, it was occupied by a series of smaller fashion movements, macro and micro trends which changed every few years to something new. Those movements included countercultural trends like futurism, grunge, purism, and romanticism which spoke to the ethos of the designer.

Calvin Klein leaned on “Purism” to showcase a different point of view based on the elegant slip dresses and lingerie of the 1930s. Not to be confused with minimalism, purism focused on omitting superfluous details in favour of simple, unpretentious styles and strong architectural silhouettes. On Vogue’s The Run-Through Podcast, Nicole Phelps interviewed Calvin Klein where he discussed his desire to design with restraint. Klein aimed to remove all unnecessary spectacle of adornment to rely on silhouette, taking inspiration from tailored garments which he was fascinated with. This was a sentiment shared by a few New York based designers of that time including Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Jil Sander.

“If design is good, shape is good, it doesn’t need extra “stuff”

- Calvin Klein, Vogue Run-Through Podcast

The purism trend, and more importantly, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy had a far-reaching impact on the fashion of the time. Beyond the clothing, it was the embodiment of attitude and style, an indescribable aura attached to her persona, emphasizing her natural intuition for self-expression through her clothes.

Erosion of Design Intuition

Restraint is required to understand Carolyn’s point of view on fashion and style. Additional jewelry, accessories, and other miscellaneous bits and bobs deviate from the original ethos of purist style. While the internet is an excellent way to build community through shared ideas, genuine taste has proven to be more elusive. Writer Matteo Azzolini eloquently penned a Substack article summarizing today’s obsession with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and why modern taste has evolved in favour of ‘more is more’. Azzolini suggests that taste is a slow, uncomfortable discovery, counterintuitive to today’s fast-paced desire to establish identity. He navigates the social media frenzy of CBK coded hashtags to investigate the collective understanding of how a younger generation interpreted the Love Story aesthetic.

Why You Should Care

The Internet Has A Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Problem

“I want to be Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, but I like jewellery too much…

Read more

5 months ago · 70 likes · 18 comments · Matteo Azzolini

Prior to social media, print media was how taste was formed. Magazines dictated seasonal trends and readers would follow suit. Looking back, the process was more insular and relied on select fashion gatekeepers. With social media, reach has expanded, making space for multiple styles to exist outside of the pre-determined trends set by print media. In contrast, today’s collection development relies on digital consumer insights. With this comes a quicker design process, which requires constant editing. Designers do not want to fail through guesswork, and instead, opt for quick answers and guaranteed success. Design intuition extends beyond the fashion industry landscape and into daily life. The expanse of social media, and ease of online shopping, have given way to faster transactions which in turn erode personal taste.

Consumer Shopping Habits

In the 1990s, online shopping was unfathomable. Shopping was done in person, and the availability of product was restricted to the geographic location where the shopping occurred. Customers would go into a physical store to touch, feel, and try on clothing and ensure accurate fit. The mall was a social gathering place for all ages, people interested in spending time together in a well-ventilated location, eating at the food court, and maybe, just maybe, buying some new clothes (hence why many 90s cult-classics such as Mallrats and Clueless were set in the mall). In previous decades, the shopping process was much slower and methodical. It required time.

In stark contrast, today, anything can be ordered directly to our front door. We can order clothing online, wait for it to arrive the next day in a (hopefully) recycled box, unpack it and hope it fits or try to remember the return-by date. Ultimately, consumers pay for this convenience, often as a subscription. Data helps companies streamline and become more efficient by placing less barriers to purchasing and designing for constant sensory stimulation. Consider the “buy now” button on Amazon or Buy-Now-Pay-Later apps which are widely adopted by Gen Z for everything from large, expensive purchases (like vacations) to everyday purchases (like clothes). Let’s face it, it’s easier to spread out payments and let future “you” deal with the repercussions of paying for something that you are already bored of using.

While fashion tends to be cyclical, I believe that consumer behavior better resembles a pendulum. Swaying back and forth as society ebbs and flows too far in either direction, and eventually, forced to course correct. While many have accepted the rapid pace of convenience, others are intentionally slowing down because being hyper-connected is no longer ‘cool’. In Europe, groups like “The Offline Club”, which started in the Netherlands and has since expanded into Germany, Indonesia, and Italy encourage slower, more intentional community engagement by providing a meeting place for individuals to gather and spend time away from their devices. Similar sentiments can be found in European fashion, with some designers expressing an eagerness to get back to a slower design process: This often looks like opting out of the never ending, hyper-speed runway circuit. Since the early 2000s, designers such as Martin Margiela (2008), Raf Simons (2015), Alber Elbaz (2015), and Phoebe Philo (2017) left their respective design houses to slow down and reassess their role within the industry.

Focusing on the present was a similar feeling to the 1990s, when fashion became fixated with the here and now, less about flash and more about an interest in average people. As the pendulum swings in favor of slowing down, watching Love Story offered me a fresh lens to explore my personal style through a ‘less is more’ mentality. It allowed me to pause and question my once unconscious routine of eclectic jewelry adornment to a much more purist sensibility (even if that only lasts for a fleeting moment until I’m on to the next thing).

Have thoughts on style, fashion-tech, or secondhand culture?

We’re always looking for new voices to feature. DM us on Substack or email hi@cacheinyourcloset.com if you’d like to be a guest editor for a future issue.

With love and hot girl energy 💚,

Cache x

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• Zara's "death pants" are the internet's main character of the summer: Meet the $45 pair of trousers that’s currently sending women to urgent care. Zara's Flowy Wide Leg Pants have an extra long, floor-skimming hem that doubles as an incredible ankle strap, and TikTok is now a graveyard of falls in parking lots, sidewalks, even a hospital hallway (yep, someone fell in these pants shortly after being treated for an earlier pants-related injury, the girlies are not okay). We've seen bruises, scraped knees, fractured bones, one cracked phone screen, and a fitting new nickname: "death pants." Multiple wearers have shown off their X-rays and stitches, and one TikToker joked that someone should make a Netflix documentary about it all. Like all the other times they’ve been involved in controversy, Zara has said absolutely nothing. And somehow none of this has slowed sales. If anything, the injury content is the marketing now. Personally I find this deeply, deeply funny, but it's also kind of the perfect metaphor for fast fashion right now: cute, cheap, viral, and not built to actually hold up under real use. If for whatever reason you’re interested in buying the pants they’re linked here (I hope you have good insurance)! For everyone else, take this as a reminder to hem your pants or buy them secondhand from someone who's already survived the trial run.

• Italian police just raided nine luxury houses over an alleged worker exploitation scheme, and Chanel is one of them: While everyone’s busy debating whether a $6,000 bag is "worth it," here's a reminder that the more urgent question is who actually made it. Italian authorities showed up at Chanel, Moncler, Brunello Cucinelli, Bulgari, and five other major houses this week demanding paperwork on their supply chains, after investigators traced subcontracting documents from two workshops accused of exploiting undocumented workers straight back to these nine brands. None of them are formally under investigation yet, and Chanel says it cut ties with the subcontractor back in May. But this isn’t a one-off. Seven other fashion groups have already gone through court-appointed administration in Italy over nearly identical issues in the last few years. Honestly, this is disappointing to see. Luxury houses are supposed to be the pinnacle of fashion as an art form, brands built and maintained as holy ground for fashion lovers, with labels whose entire value proposition relies on history, craftsmanship, and iconography that's stood the test of time. That's the whole premise you're paying for. It's sad that even these houses are willing to cut corners and exploit workers for a fatter margin, watching them lose sight of the values they were built on. Luxury loves to sell you the story of the atelier and the artisan, and this is a good moment to remember that story doesn't always hold up past the second or third subcontractor down the chain.

• The global resale market has officially gone mainstream, and the numbers are wild: We’ve been saying this, but now Bain & Co. has the receipts. A new report says 42% of US consumers bought secondhand clothing in the last year, the UK's at 48%, France at 45%, Germany at 37%, and this isn't just people pinching pennies. The report specifically calls out that buying preowned is now a conscious, deliberate choice for affluent consumers who could easily afford new, particularly among younger shoppers. Brands are catching on too: In-house resale programs like Zara Pre-Owned, Lululemon Like New, and Patagonia's trade-in system have exploded by triple digits since 2021, with over 150 major US brands now running their own resale arms. The logic is super simple: if they don't sell their own secondhand stock, somebody else’ll profit off it instead. This way, brands keep the margin and the customer relationship internal. Global resale revenue is now tracking toward $393 billion by 2030, growing more than twice as fast as regular apparel sales (wow!). Gen Z is leading the movement, with roughly 80% of 18-24 year olds actively buying secondhand. At Cache, this is exactly what we want to see in the industry. Embracing secondhand shopping into daily purchasing habits and seeing it for what it is: a HUGE win-win. Consumers get lower prices, and less clothes end up in landfill. We want to bring the world one step closer to that, one closet sale at a time.

• Victoria's Secret is taking its runway show to LA for the first time in 19 years, and Gigi Hadid's already confirmed: After two years reviving the spectacle in Brooklyn, VS announced this week it's packing up the wings and heading west, calling LA "the birthplace of glamour, stardom, and icons.” Super humble and low key if you ask me. Gigi confirmed her spot with an Instagram video leaning out of a car window yelling, "get in, Angels, we're going to LA," which proves that like clothing, even cheesy movie references can be re-used limitlessly. This'll be her fifth time walking for the brand and her third year in a row since the reboot, so she's basically tenured at this point. And, she's currently the only model officially confirmed for the show. The last time the show touched down in LA was 2007, followed by a nearly two-decade run through cities like Miami, London, Paris, Cannes, and Shanghai, so this really is a full-circle moment for a brand that's spent the last few years very publicly figuring out what it wants to be post-hiatus. VS also ran a nationwide open casting call earlier this year to find fresh new faces for the Angel lineup, with selected models landing IMG contracts, so expect a mix of legacy names and brand-new ones this fall. No date, full lineup, or musical guest yet, but details are promised in the coming months. We’re keeping our eyes peeled for more!

• A trend expert said the quiet part out loud about why Vinted blew up, and it's not the reason you'd think: Speaking at Source Fashion in London last week, Jack Stratten, head of trends at Insider Trends, said the thing nobody in resale marketing wants printed on a tote bag: "Vinted hasn't exploded because people all around the world suddenly decided that they care about the planet and they want to buy secondhand." According to Stratten, the real driver behind resale's boom is value, plain and simple. People are tired of paying full price for new clothes, and secondhand is just cheaper, with sustainability riding along as a nice byproduct rather than the actual reason anyone's opening the app. This tracks with what we're seeing everywhere else too: the Bain report above basically says the same thing in fancier language. Resale is winning right now because it's smart shopping, not because everyone suddenly grew a conscience. A little deflating if you were holding onto the save-the-planet narrative as the whole story, but also, and don’t hate me for this, who cares? Do we wish that sustainable fashion is becoming more popularized because everyone suddenly cares about the planet? Of course. But if the thing that’s going to make secondhand fashion attractive to the masses is saving money, we’ll take that win, and the planet will too.

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• Why more returns are ending up in the resale channel: For years, returns were retail's dirty little secret, tossed onto a pallet and sold off for pennies on the dollar just to make the problem disappear. Now, brands are waking up to the fact that a slightly-used $200 pair of jeans is worth way more to a new customer than it is to a liquidator. Companies like Archive and Treet are helping brands like Lululemon and The North Face route their returns straight into branded resale sites, and they're seeing 50-60% of MSRP instead of the usual 10-20% liquidation graveyard price. The kicker is that half of those resale buyers are brand new to the label, meaning brands are essentially getting paid to acquire customers. This is quite literally our whole thesis at Cache, resale isn't the sad, dusty back room of retail anymore, it's the smartest room in the house.

• France just passed the first law in Europe specifically targeting ultra-fast fashion: Shein and Temu, this one's for you. After years of back and forth debate, France's parliament finally pushed through a law that goes after the entire ultra-fast fashion business model. It introduces a per-item environmental fee starting small and climbing to €20 per item by 2030, capped at half the product's retail price. Starting in 2027, it bans all advertising for these brands outright, including the word "free," and it fines influencers up to €100,000 for promoting them. Platforms will even be required to display messages encouraging people to repair, reuse, and buy less. It's a genuinely aggressive shift from a country that's clearly tired of watching landfills fill up with five dollar tops. The best part for us resale girlies is that the law explicitly carves out an exception for resale of unsold goods, meaning secondhand stays protected while the disposable stuff finally gets taxed like the environmental liability it is. A win dressed up as legislation, and hopefully a preview of what's coming to the rest of Europe.

• The UK's only commercial-scale polyester-to-polyester recycling plant just got GRS certified: Meet Project Re:claim, the unglamorous hero of circular fashion that nobody's talking about but everybody should be. Born out of a partnership between Plan B Circular and the Salvation Army Trading Company, this 35,000-square-foot plant takes old sportswear, uniforms, duvets, even promotional scrim, and turns it back into usable polyester yarn, all while using up to 90% less energy than making virgin polyester from scratch. It can process roughly 3,000 tons of material a year, which sounds abstract until you remember that's thousands of garments that would've otherwise sat in a landfill for the next few centuries. Now that it's officially Global Recycled Standard certified, meaning it hits the 50% minimum recycled content threshold and meets social and environmental requirements, brands sourcing from it can actually back up their "sustainable" labels instead of just slapping a green leaf on the tag and calling it a day. Circularity isn't just a buzzword anymore, it's becoming actual infrastructure, and infrastructure is exactly what this industry has been missing.

• Olivier Rousteing is leaving Balmain for Rabanne: After 14 years of turning Balmain into a celebrity-dressing, logo-heavy, red carpet fixture (RIP to the Balmain Army era), Rousteing is officially closing that chapter and heading to Rabanne, stepping into the role Julien Dossena quietly exited earlier this summer after 13 years at the helm. Rousteing took over Balmain back in 2011 at just 25 years old, making him one of the youngest designers ever to lead a historic French house, and he spent the next decade and a half turning it into a global cultural force through bold embroidery, celebrity partnerships, and an Instagram presence most brands could only dream of. His debut Rabanne collection doesn't drop until March 2027, but given his signature "more is more" sensibility meeting Rabanne's already-maximalist chainmail and metallic world, we're fully expecting things to get somehow even louder. Consider this the fashion equivalent of a trade deadline blockbuster… honestly, we are here for the chaos.

• Chanel bought Charvet, the 188-year-old shirtmaker on Place Vendôme: This isn't just a heritage flex, it's Chanel making sure one of France's last standing specialist shirtmakers doesn't disappear on its watch. Charvet has operated out of the same address on Place Vendôme since 1877, dressing everyone from Marcel Proust to Winston Churchill, and it's remained family-owned and profitable this entire time, which makes the timing here even more interesting. The deal comes on the heels of Charvet-made shirts becoming one of the breakout pieces of creative director Matthieu Blazy's debut collection for Chanel, proving sometimes the best business moves start with a really good outfit. Financial terms weren't disclosed, but Chanel now also owns Charvet's building on Place Vendôme, adding to its growing list of acquired ateliers that includes swimwear label Orlebar Brown and milliner Maison Michel. There's also some juicy brand lore here: Coco Chanel's great love, Boy Capel, was reportedly a loyal Charvet client back in the day, so this acquisition is basically Chanel buying back a piece of its own origin story. Money, craftsmanship, and a two hundred year old situationship, name a more iconic combination.

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• Zendaya wore a couture dress straight off the Paris runway to the Odyssey premiere — and Law Roach chartered a private jet to make it happen: The Schiaparelli fall 2026 couture show closed Monday morning in Paris with a porcelain-bodiced gown illuminated from within, cascading into a white-to-mirror ombré fringe skirt. Eight hours later, Zendaya wore it to the London premiere of The Odyssey. Law Roach saw the look go down the runway, secured it, boarded a private jet, and got it on Zendaya in time for the red carpet…a move that feels like something out of The Devil Wears Prada, except it actually happened. The look fit perfectly: Zendaya plays Athena in the Christopher Nolan film, and the sculptural bodice made her look exactly like a marble statue brought to life. She then changed into a Valentino sage bralette and draped Grecian skirt inside the premiere because apparently one couture look was not enough. Method dressing remains the blueprint and Zendaya is still the only one doing it at this level.

• H&M, ThredUp, Depop, and The RealReal just teamed up to kill the sales tax on secondhand clothing: Spearheaded by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a coalition of over 70 brands and resale platforms—including H&M, Primark, Stella McCartney, ThredUp, Vestiaire Collective, The RealReal, Etsy, and Depop—sent a formal demand to governments this week calling for sales tax exemptions on used clothing. The argument is simple: when a resale shopper pays tax on a secondhand piece, they are paying tax on something that was already taxed when it was bought new. Double taxation on circular fashion is a circular economy killer. The coalition is also pushing for lower labor taxes on jobs that keep the resale economy running: clothing sorters, warehouse workers, garment repair specialists. Resale is already growing two to three times faster than primary retail, and the brands signing this letter know it. Anything that makes it cheaper to buy used is good for their bottom line and good for the whole secondhand ecosystem. Cache lives right at the center of that ecosystem, and this kind of policy shift would make the market we are building toward move a whole lot faster. Love to see it!!

• Matthieu Blazy turned the Grand Palais into a dark fairytale for Chanel and it might be the show of the year: Blazy found a leather-bound book of fairytales in Gabrielle Chanel's personal library and built his entire sophomore couture collection around it. "Gaby and the Beanstalk" took over the Grand Palais on Tuesday with towering beanstalks, psychedelic flowers, and a front row that included Tilda Swinton, Pedro Pascal, Michelle Yeoh, and Catherine Deneuve. The clothes told stories…literally. Jackets were lined with painted illustrations and mock to-do lists stitched in sheer silk. Heels were sculpted into butterflies, golden eggs, and beanstalk vines. Evening bags were shaped like sleeping bears and red hens. The show closed not with a bridal look but a bare black off-the-shoulder dress, a nod to the fact that Coco Chanel never married. Blazy is two shows into his Chanel tenure and already writing the best chapter the house has seen in years. We’re obsessed!!!

• Pierpaolo Piccioli made his Balenciaga couture debut and it was all about obsessive handcraft: On Wednesday morning in Paris, Piccioli presented his first-ever couture collection for Balenciaga in the gardens of the Cité Internationale Universitaire, lush, leafy, and deliberately lived-in. The clothes were staggering in their labor intensity: cashmere coats with hand-molded leather panels hidden inside, a single gown covered in 24,150 individually hand-shredded gazar petals, and a lab-grown silk alternative making its haute couture debut, still cut and finished entirely by hand. The show closed with Gigi Hadid in a mass of hand-set black rooster feathers made with milliner Philip Treacy. After Demna's decade of subversion at the house, Piccioli is doing something quieter and arguably harder, returning to the principles of Cristóbal Balenciaga without making it feel like nostalgia. "Not homage, but recalibration." Everyone agrees, he is pulling it off.

• The company behind fashion's virtual try-on moment just opened it up to any developer who wants to build with it: Perfect Corp., the AI and AR company powering virtual try-on for over 800 global brands, is at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin this week showcasing its full API suite covering skin analysis, makeup try-on, clothes try-on, and jewelry try-on, while also launching a global hackathon that invites any developer in the world to build with it. Submissions are open through August 16 with up to $5,000 in prizes. The move is significant because it signals that virtual try-on is no longer a luxury feature reserved for brands with the budget to build proprietary tech. It is becoming infrastructure, the kind that any startup, resale platform, or indie retailer can plug into and deploy. Fashion tech is expanding fast and the most exciting part is that the innovation is no longer coming exclusively from the top down. Platforms like Cache are proof that the future of fashion is being built by people who actually love it, and tools like this just make that future easier to reach.

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

I’m so excited to bring my take to this awesome series. My goal is simple: highlight brands that don't just follow trends, but create them. The ones whose pieces make a statement, tell a story, and earn a permanent spot in your closet.

This month, we are going out. Not metaphorically. Literally. Summer is here, the group chat is active, and there is truly no better feeling than standing in front of your mirror before a night out and knowing that you nailed it. The outfit that makes you walk out the door a little differently. The piece that turns heads everywhere you go. The look that gives you confidence.

We went looking for the brands that make that feeling possible not just once, but every time you reach for them. Six independent labels for women who get dressed with intention. The rule was simple: if it is not something your entire friend group is going to ask to borrow before the night is over, it didn’t make the cut.

1. entremains

entremains is one of the first fashion brands built entirely from secondhand. Not "we have a resale tab on our website." Not "we used some deadstock once." Every single collection is curated from pre-loved pieces, styled into seasonal silhouettes, and sold in limited quantities.

Founded in Paris in 2020 by Sophie Boirard and Camille Chatelet, the brand operates on the thesis that production is the problem, and curation is the answer. Kind of like what we do here at Cache!!! Their tagline is "More Fashion, Less Production" which is honestly one of the best sentences anyone has written about the industry in years. They are stocked at Merci and Galeries Lafayette, telling you everything you need to know about the taste level. The pieces are unique, the ethos is airtight, and the whole thing feels like what fashion should have been doing all along. When it comes to a GNO, entremains balances edge with a soft chicness. Their collection feels like shopping from your cool older sister’s closet, and is filled with staples that will serve as worthy additions to any wardrobe.

2. By Ellen With Love

Some brands make clothes. By Ellen With Love makes the piece everyone asks about. The Perth-based label is entirely handmade to order by designer Ellen herself, dropping new collections once a month and selling out almost immediately every single time. The fringe pieces are what put her on the map: sleek, sexy silhouettes with movement that does exactly what going-out dressing is supposed to do. You walk in, the fringe moves, the room notices. There is no simpler formula than that.

What makes By Ellen With Love special beyond the aesthetic is the model behind it. Nothing is produced without a buyer, which means every piece you receive was made specifically for you, not pulled from a warehouse shelf. The craftsmanship shows. The viral black midi fringe dress has taken on a life of its own across TikTok and resale platforms alike, and for good reason. It’s the kind of piece that photographs beautifully, wears even better, and somehow looks good on every single body. If you have been on the fence about pulling the trigger on a drop, consider this your sign. Set a reminder, because these sell out fast.

3. Because of Alice

Alice Olivia Cross built Because of Alice the way every good brand should be built — with a genuine point of view, no outside investors, and an audience who already trusted her taste. The result is a contemporary British womenswear brand that has grown to 551K Instagram followers, certified B Corp status, and collections that sell out consistently, all manufactured in Portugal and Spain. Four years in and it still feels like a discovery.

The best way to describe BOA? It’s somehow Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda all in one. The pieces are clean-lined, structured, and deeply wearable. Blazer dresses, slip silhouettes, elevated basics that feel expensive without trying to convince you they are. I am currently obsessed with the zebra print pieces they’re showing. Animal print is back in the way that feels intentional rather than nostalgic, and BOA is doing it with the kind of restraint that makes it feel genuinely chic rather than costume-y. The kind of piece you wear out and spend the whole night fielding “wait, where is that from?” questions. BOA is the brand that proves the influencer-to-founder pipeline works when the founder actually has something to say, and we’re all ears!

4. Hand Over

If you’ve been in London in the last twelve months, you have seen the Camilo's skirt. Sequined, statement, completely unignorable. That is Hand Over. The London label has become the brand most associated with the current sequin moment, but what makes it interesting is the specificity of the world it is building: Upper East Side energy crossed with vibrant Spanish flair, Serena Van Der Woodsen if she grew up in Madrid. The brand is committed to ethical production and a plastic-free future, which makes their fun eclectic pieces that much cooler. Hand Over is a masterclass on creating the kind of piece you buy for one night and wear twelve times. Ironic for a brand whose tagline is 'your ex's stolen boxers’. Take this as a gentle reminder to leave some things in the past and replace them with a pink sparkly version. Your closet will thank you. Some brands make clothes, Hand Over makes an entrance. Consider this your sign to add to cart

5. Perfect Corset NYC

The corset is not a trend anymore, it is a silhouette. Perfect Corset NYC has built an entire brand around doing it well. Founded on the premise of “powered by women, for women,” the NYC label has amassed 327K Instagram followers by making corsets that actually work—structured enough to be a statement, wearable enough to actually go out in. This is not a corset you wrestle into and spend the whole night thinking about. This is the corset you put on and immediately stand up straighter, look in the mirror, and decide the night just got a lot more interesting.

I wore mine for my 21st birthday and I have genuinely never received more compliments on a single piece of clothing in my life. There is something about a perfect corset that changes the entire energy of an outfit, and an entire evening. It is the kind of piece that makes everything else around it make sense, whether you are throwing it over a pair of jeans for dinner or pairing it with a skirt for a full girls night moment. The brand lives at the intersection of body-positive dressing and unapologetic femininity, and the pieces come in enough silhouettes and colorways that everyone in your group chat could find her version. Perfect Corset NYC is not just a brand, it is a rite of passage. Consider this your sign to finally pull the trigger.

6. SACH Atelier

Let’s talk about jewelry for a second. Not the delicate gold chain you forget you are wearing. Not the pearl studs you put in on autopilot. The kind of jewelry that changes the entire conversation of an outfit. The kind that makes a simple black dress feel like a character study and a going-out look feel like a full editorial. That is what SACH Atelier does.

The Spanish brand handcrafts every single piece in their workshop in Spain using unexpected materials—mirror, mixed metals, sculptural forms—that sit on the body in a way that feels intentional rather than decorative. The brand describes their pieces as “fusing delicacy and strength” and honestly that is the most accurate two-word summary of what great going-out jewelry should do. Bold enough to be noticed, refined enough to feel like you. SACH the kind of brand that turns a first purchase into a lifelong loyalty and a second purchase into an inevitability.

GNO lives and dies by the details. The outfit can be perfect but the right accessory is what makes it iconic. SACH Atelier is the finishing touch that makes everything else click, and once you find your piece, you will understand exactly what we mean.

Girls night out starts way before you leave the house, it starts the moment you open your closet and decide tonight you are going all out. I hope this list made that decision a little more exciting and a lot more intentional. If any of these brands make it into your rotation, your next night out, or your moodboard, I want to know about it.

With love and hot girl energy,

Yasmeen Kallel 💚

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• Meta put Kylie Jenner's voice in its AI glasses and it's not a celebrity endorsement, it's a distribution strategy: Meta launched its first AI-powered smart glasses under its own brand name this week, starting at $299, and one of the three styles is a Kylie Jenner co-designed version where her voice is literally the on-board AI assistant. Because everyone wants to wake up to King Kylie saying "rise and shine" in the morning! The smarter read here is not the product but the play: Meta doesn't need more tech buyers, they already own 80% of the AI glasses market. They needed access to the 18-35 women who had never considered the category. Kylie's audience is that audience, and by making her presence a product feature rather than a campaign, Meta built a relationship that travels into people's daily lives. The question every brand should be asking after this is not "who is our Kylie" but "whose audience do we need access to, and what would we have to build to earn a place in their world?"

  

• Mercari just opened a direct door to Japan's secondhand market for American shoppers: Mercari launched a standalone US app called Mercari Japan this week, giving American buyers direct access to Japan's largest online marketplace with none of the usual cross-border friction. The app handles AI-powered real-time translation, USD payment processing, mandatory item inspections before anything ships, and full package tracking throughout delivery. It will eventually replace the existing Mercari x Japan feature that was buried inside the domestic US platform. For anyone who has ever gone down a rabbit hole trying to source Japanese vintage or designer pieces, this is a big deal. Japan's resale market is famously pristine and incredibly well-curated, and now it's basically one app away. Looking for another place for curated second-hand shopping? Try Cache, your favorite influencer’s closet is just one click away. ;)

• Prime Day just hit $26.4 billion and the numbers tell a complicated story: Amazon's Prime Day ran June 23-26 and drove $26.4 billion in total spending, a 9.3% year-over-year jump that sounds triumphant until you read the fine print. Average order sizes are down 17%. Apparel discounts were virtually identical to last year at 24%. A growing chunk of those purchases were financed through Buy Now Pay Later, with 44% of Gen Z consumers already using it regularly. What economists are calling "intertemporal substitution" is what the rest of us call anxiety shopping: consumers pulling future purchases into the present to avoid paying more for it later. Prime Day, which has now been moved earlier three years in a row, is quietly being engineered into a preemptive panic-buy event. Record numbers, but not necessarily a healthy consumer.

• LVMH just launched a super yacht for AI billionaires and it tells you everything about where luxury is heading: LVMH and Accor launched the Orient Express Corinthian this week, a 220-metre superyacht with 54 suites, five restaurants, a Guerlain beauty salon, and Hennessy cognac in the penthouse. Entry-level suites start at €25,000 for four days. The target customer is explicitly the new wave of tech and AI billionaires, with Accor's CEO explaining it plainly: "When people have seven homes and 12 cars and 17 watches, it's not to have an 18th watch." That quote is basically the entire thesis for where luxury is going right now. Spending on high-end experiences is forecast to grow 9-11% this year, while personal luxury goods are tracking at 1-4%. LVMH is betting that the next chapter of luxury is not something you wear, it's somewhere you go.

• H&M, Zara, and Amazon are lobbying the EU so they don't have to label their AI ads: EuroCommerce, the retail association representing Amazon, H&M, Inditex, and Ikea, sent a letter to the EU's tech chief this week asking to be carved out of the AI Act's incoming transparency rules. Starting August 2nd, the law requires companies to disclose when AI is used to generate or alter images, video, or audio that qualifies as a "deep fake." The retail lobby's argument: product visuals enhanced with AI, like a sofa in a staged living room or a model image touched up for an ad, are not meant to deceive anyone, so they should not count. The underlying number that makes this fight make sense is that Zalando says AI has already cut its content production costs by 90%. For an industry that generates thousands of product images a week, mandatory labeling on all of it would be a significant operational headache. The EU has not responded yet, and the clock is ticking.

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

Every month, you can expect to receive a little *hump day treat* in your inbox — our newsletter with the latest updates on Cache. Craving more? Follow us on Instagram and TikTok for an even better time.

Let’s Cache up! In today’s newsletter…

• 🦄 What We’re Working On: New team members, new processes, new look… it’s all happening.

• 💡 What We’ve Learned: Be aware, but stay in your lane.

• 📓 What We’re Reading: Peep the top shopping apps in the U.S….

• 💚 What’s Cache-ing My Eye: A new section to highlight the things—news, brands, culture, products—that genuinely stopped me in my tracks.

• 🪩 What’s Happening: Summer is for vintage markets.

Sell with Cache 💚

Are you a Substack-er with an engaged, loyal audience? Or maybe your community lives on IG, TikTok, or YouTube. If so—and if your closet is full of pieces ready for a second life—you might be the perfect fit for Cache.

Cache turns closets into connection. Let us host your closet sale so you can monetize the pieces you actually own—not just the ones you recommend.

Apply to sell with us today or reach out to for more info!

What We’ve Been Working On:

• This month has been about turning inwards: After 10x-ing our GMV last month (ya, you heard that right), we're ready to keep the momentum going, but we also wanted to take a beat to pause and regroup. Our little engine that could (can, and does) has gotten us this far, but every good vehicle needs to stop for gas. So that's exactly what this month has been about. Making sure the app interface reflects the sophisticated product we're building toward. Making sure new team members are ramping up smoothly and exiting ones are leaving their mark behind (in social templates, deliverables, and playbooks). Making sure processes are locked in and roadmaps are mapped out, not just for this quarter, but for the rest of the year (and the foundation we're laying beyond that). With a small team, we can accomplish a lot, but unless we sprout a few extra arms, we're still working with two per person and not that many people (luv u, Claude!). This month has been about dedicating the time and resources to refuel, so the next six months are even better than the last.

What We’ve Learned:

• Stay aware, but stay in your lane: Resale is having a moment (understatement of the year), and with that comes a flood of new players, new apps, new “disruptive” solutions popping up seemingly every week. It would be easy to get caught up watching every single one of them, refreshing competitor pages like it’s a sport. You can’t build in a bubble. Knowing the landscape matters. But there’s a difference between staying aware and staying obsessed, and the latter will eat your focus alive. The truth is, noise is just noise until you let it become a distraction. When you have a clear vision for what you’re building and why, the real work is holding onto that vision with both hands and getting laser focused on the actual steps, the actual goals, the actual roadmap to get there. Everyone else can do their thing. We’ll be over here doing ours.

What We’re Reading: This is crazy and wild and amazing and validating and and and!!!! To see not one but THREE resale apps surpass Temu and Amazon Shopping and Walmart and Shein as the top shopping apps in the United States is the most GLARING and OBVIOUS signal there is. If you’re not betting on resale, you’re falling behind.

For a full weekly roundup of the latest fashion, tech, and resale news, be sure to check out our new series, Cache Flow!

What’s Cache-ing My Eye:

As an avid consumer of culture and doom scroller like the rest & best of ‘em, I figured it was time to start letting my screenshots and saved folder live outside the confines of my cellular device and, instead, within the outer orbits of your inbox. There is no rhyme or reason to this list other than it being a collection of things that recently made me stop in my tracks (for one reason or another):

• Zendaya wore a $35 Spider-Man T-Shirt sourced on eBay at the premiere of the franchise’s latest flick and I am WEAK

• This newly discovered brand that is reimagining vintage sportswear x travel (need to get my hands on one of these tanks)

• A denim Chanel tote that I couldn’t snag in time but can’t stop thinking about

• Every bangle and pinky ring from ’s jewelry line

• The Diet Coke slushie going viral in Toronto

What’s Happening:

• July 1: Sip & Shop (NYC, in person)

• July 10-12:

  • Not a Normal Hamptons Show (Hamptons, in person)

  • Thx It’s Thrifted x The Lucky Flea (NYC, in person)

  • Seven Moods Vintage Pop-Up (NYC, in person)

• July 25-26: Thx It’s Thrifted x The Lucky Flea (NYC, in person)

• August 8-9: Thx It’s Thrifted x The Lucky Flea (NYC, in person)

• August 22-23: Thx It’s Thrifted x The Lucky Flea (NYC, in person)

• September 26-27: Toronto Vintage Show (Toronto, in person)

Want to advertise your event? Send us a DM! We would love to include it.

Song of the Month: I HAVE NOT STOPPED PLAYING THIS. THE MUSIC VIDEO IS ALSO INCREDIBLE. DKNJGJKSNDGN GAHHHHH I <3 SOMBR!

Until next time… Cache ya later!

Like what you see? Subscribe to receive future updates or drop us a line below.

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

Download the app to unlock the internet’s most coveted closets.

• The UK just told Adidas, Calvin Klein, and Uniqlo that "recycled" is not a personality: The UK's Advertising Standards Authority banned Google ads from all three brands this week after none of them could actually substantiate their "recycled" claims. Adidas promoted a recycled running shoe range that, per their own admission, doesn't exist as a dedicated line. Calvin Klein said some of its tops included "environmentally preferred materials" ranging anywhere from 20% to 100% recycled content. Uniqlo argued consumers would understand the nuance. The ASA disagreed with all three. This is the second wave of bans—Nike, Superdry, and Lacoste got hit in December—and the watchdog flagged these cases proactively using AI monitoring, meaning brands can no longer count on flying under the radar. The message is getting clearer: slapping "recycled" on an ad without receipts is now a liability, not a selling point.

• Skims x Hailey Bieber is the campaign of the summer, and everyone knows it: Skims dropped its Everyday Cotton campaign this week starring Hailey Bieber, shot by Mert Alas, and the internet delivered accordingly. Justin Bieber reposted the campaign photos and racked up 1.1 million likes before most people had finished their morning coffee. The collection itself is straightforward—triangle bralettes, hipster briefs, classics in neutral shades and a new Peony colorway, but the casting is the story. Hailey brings the kind of effortless, model-off-duty energy that makes basics feel like a mood, which is exactly what Skims needed for a permanent core collection. At this point, a Skims campaign is fashion's version of a blue check: everyone who is anyone has done one.

  

• Paris Men's Fashion Week is giving us everything this week: The most anticipated week in menswear is currently unfolding in Paris, with 74 brands showing SS27 collections through June 28. Louis Vuitton opened the week with Pharrell staging a human-scale Snakes and Ladders game outside the Centre Pompidou, pulling inspiration from Mumbai and filling the front row with Rami Malek, Austin Butler, and Madonna. Saint Laurent delivered slim suits and transparent elongated shoes at the Bourse de Commerce. And the week's most-watched moment is still ahead: Jonathan Anderson's debut collection for Dior menswear on Friday, which he's been teasing with references to Dracula and Les Liaisons Dangereuses. No pressure.

• Brand Substacks are not just vibes anymore, they're revenue: The RealReal's anonymous "RealGirl" Substack has generated over $334,000 in sales, which was not even the original goal. The newsletter started as a community play and ended up moving product so consistently that the brand had to start tracking it. Total views quadrupled year over year to 236,000, and subscriber count grew 138% to over 8,000. Fashion and beauty are leading Substack's growth overall, with publications and subscriptions in the category more than doubling year over year since 2022. The brands winning here are the ones treating it like editorial, not a press release dump. Readers engage when it feels like a person wrote it. The era of the brand-as-media-company is not coming, it is already here. And for a platform like Cache, where the product is literally a curated point of view, a Substack is less of a marketing channel and more of a natural extension of what it already does. This space is more than just a way to gain exposure, for Cache it’s a community we want to cultivate.

  

• AI shopping agents are now driving more sales than social media: Salesforce dropped its biggest Agentforce Commerce release at Cannes Lions this week, and the numbers it came with are hard to ignore. AI influenced 20% of global online sales worth $262 billion during last holiday season. Retailers running their own AI shopper agents grew sales 59% faster than those that did not. And AI-referred traffic converts at eight times the rate of social. The release includes a Shopper Agent that handles discovery through checkout, a B2B Buyer Agent operating over WhatsApp and SMS, and a Merchant Agent that lets operations teams manage catalogs in plain language. Early customers reported 88% reductions in time-to-task. The broader takeaway: the brands that figure out AI as a sales channel now are not just keeping up, they are lapping the ones still optimizing their Instagram grid.

  

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

With each installment, our guest editors open up about the emotions, habits, and systems that shape how they get dressed and make choices about their wardrobe.

Here at , we believe style is an ongoing process rooted in psychology. It’s deeply subjective, and it can’t be reduced to simply buying into the latest trends.

My Corporate Job Saved My Style

For many of us, I suspect, our individual relationships to style are deeply intertwined with our identity. What we wear is often the first thing we tell others about ourselves. So what happens when one’s identity - the mix of interests, values, beliefs, and expressions that makes each of us unique - becomes trapped by circumstances that feel disconnected from who we perceive ourselves to be? How does it affect us when what we look like on the outside masks, or even puts at risk, who we embrace on the inside?

And to complicate matters, what if we imagine ourselves to be interested in, or even genuinely representative of, more than one identity? Must one’s style be a definitive, singular thing? Or can we show up in different ways and still be true? Must style be static, or can it be at once inconsistent and evolving, and yet still genuine?

Obviously, I’ve thought at length about these questions. I’ve spent my life nurturing and seeking joy in my own creative instincts, but have often found myself in environments where the style that represented that aspect of me felt stifled.

Soccer kid, student, corporate cog; over many years, I suppressed my creative self in all of those identities, struggling to publicly present myself as having more than one side to show. Because the creative me wasn’t ever the focus at a given time or place, I didn’t view myself as having the bona fide experience to prove that identity, so I didn’t feel comfortable claiming it. Until I began to use my creative instincts, that is, to reject convention and investigate my own relationship with style accross all of my identities.

For most of my youth, I was known to those in my life as an athlete. “Soccer girl” was my identity. When you start competitive soccer at the age of eight and do well enough, there’s kind of nothing else to do but let it take center stage. For years, it was all I knew about myself, until it wasn’t. Against the backdrop of nonstop practice and tournaments, serendipity unlocked the door to another version of me that exists to this day.

This may sound manufactured, but I actually remember the first time I went into a thrift store. The mom of one of my best friends was an artist. That was her identity, and so getting her kids to dress up and make things was always the activity she encouraged most. One afternoon, on the way home from soccer practice, we pulled into a Goodwill parking lot in pursuit of some craft project or make-believe adventure. I don’t remember what we bought, only that it felt like a beginning.

By the time I entered high school, thrifting had become my refuge. With $20 and a vision, I could transform into someone entirely new. I spent hours watching YouTube hauls, following Internet Girl’s rise as a businesswoman, and fantasizing about what it might mean to have my own page. Still, that fascination felt private. It didn’t align with the athlete persona I’d carried my entire life, and I knew embracing it would require an intentional rebrand.

And so, eventually, a rebrand is exactly what I did.

Armed with a growing thrifting addiction and very little attachment to my own clothing, I turned my bedroom into a DIY Depop studio. I photographed my clothes, listed them online, and quickly fell in love with the process. Any time I wasn’t in a school or soccer uniform, I was crafting the image of who I aspired to be.

To my surprise, I quickly gained a following. By 2016, I had 3,000 followers on Depop, which felt life-changing. That small success gave me the confidence to quit soccer after a decade and fully embrace the person I was becoming.

When I moved to New York for college, I felt like I’d finally arrived as myself. No one knew me as the “soccer girl” anymore. I could just show up as the fashion-obsessed person I quietly spent years becoming. I spent my free time in college scouring the circular fashion scene in New York, dressing for nights out, treating themed parties like the Met Gala, and fueling my love of secondhand fashion through experimentation and play.

For years, style had always been the thread connecting different versions of myself. And without warning, Corporate America became the first environment that threatened to sever it.

The girl who had spent years building an identity around thrifting and individuality suddenly felt ridiculous trying to own that side of herself in an office, paralyzed by circumstance. College felt like a stage to rehearse who I was and operate in a constant state of flux; my corporate job felt like a cage. I panicked and became what I thought people wanted me to be.

I bought blazers and loafers, thrifted, but blazers and loafers nonetheless. I even wore a hand-me-down pantsuit from my mom. I was convinced my wardrobe, the essence of a style I had spent years curating, no longer fit my reality.

Half the week, I felt trapped in a corporate costume; the other, I worked from home in sweatpants, feeling like a bum. The subway rides that once made me feel romantic about New York started to feel mechanical, like I was just another bot moving through the simulation.

Weekends became my only opportunity to step back into myself, but even that felt rushed and temporary, fragmented and disingenuous. Getting dressed and being experimental with style had become foundational to my identity, but my new, day-to-day, grown-up reality didn’t feel aligned. It sounds dramatic, but my optimism for the future slowly dimmed.

A lot of people in their early twenties feel like every decision is permanent, and that every job might be a final destination, and I wasn’t exempt. I couldn’t leave my role, right? The corporate grind was stable and secure, the embodiment of adulthood. But was it worth selling my soul for? I had invested so intentionally in developing my creative identity and felt pride in the risks I took to get there, so I had to ask myself: how do I evolve my confidence and credibility in the professional realm without abandoning the creative person I am at my core?

When I stripped things back, one thing became incredibly obvious: my favorite part of the day, every day, was still getting dressed.

I couldn’t change my job overnight, but I could change how I showed up to it. And it turned out that showing up as myself was far more intuitive than trying to perform or fit into someone else’s version of professionalism. I pushed to define my style more consciously instead of losing it, and myself, completely.

The more I experimented, the more I realized my style wasn’t a liability in the workplace. It was actually an asset. Developing a point of view through clothing helped me develop one professionally. Trying to blend in was stifling my confidence and creativity, both of which were essential to the work I was doing. The path forward started to come into focus.

All of this has led to something both full circle, and bigger, for me. I started , my Substack newsletter exploring my style journey in a professional environment, as a creative outlet, but also as a way to formalize the “proof” I always felt I needed to exist in creative spaces. I didn’t need to wait for someone else’s validation; I could get started on my own. I began documenting my outfits, assigning myself styling challenges, and reclaiming joy in corporate fashion. From picking out the perfect office-to-dinner look to finding unique ways to introduce denim into my office wardrobe, I pushed myself to hone my perspective, letting secondhand clothing serve as my silent rebellion. Somehow, operating within the structure of business casual didn’t strip me of my identity like I feared it would. It clarified it.

Dress Rehearsal

About "Dress Rehearsal"

My name is Maya Bluthenthal. I’m 26, based in New York City, and working in marketing and talent strategy. For the past four years, I’ve been navigating Corporate America—commuting from my apartment in Bushwick (and now, Chinatown) to a high-rise in Midtown four days a week…

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a year ago · 6 likes · Maya Bluthenthal

My style continues to mature alongside my professional growth. I’m less interested in reactively trend-chasing and more interested in building a wardrobe that feels versatile, intentional, and lasting. I now invest in higher-quality secondhand pieces that can move across all aspects of my life, while still grounding me in the values that first made me fall in love with thrifting.

Even after eventually transitioning into a more creative industry with a far more casual office culture, the foundation I built during those truly corporate years never left me. Learning how to preserve my sense of self and creative spark in an environment that didn’t naturally reflect it, gave me a confidence I now carry into every room.

My style has become something that moves and breathes with me rather than something dependent on my environment. Secondhand fashion remains the through line, grounding me in who I’ve always been while reminding me of the person I’m still becoming, both professionally and personally.

Have thoughts on style, fashion-tech, or secondhand culture?

We’re always looking for new voices to feature. DM us on Substack or email hi@cacheinyourcloset.com if you’d like to be a guest editor for a future issue.

With love and hot girl energy 💚,

Navya (a.k.a. technocouture)

Cache turns influencer closets into storefronts. The destination to buy what your favorite creators actually wore, not just what they recommend.

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• Retailers discover AI’s biggest challenge is operational readiness: While nearly 90% of retailers are already using or piloting AI and 87% report positive revenue impact, only about a quarter have successfully scaled AI across their organizations. The biggest barrier is not the technology itself but the operational infrastructure needed to support it, including reliable devices, connectivity, cameras, and real-time data systems. As AI becomes embedded in inventory management, computer vision, personalization, and associate tools, retailers are shifting their focus from experimenting with AI to strengthening the “edge” infrastructure that enables consistent execution. Industry experts argue that future AI success will depend less on new algorithms and more on building stable, scalable operational foundations that can support innovation across stores and distribution centers.

• LVMH spotlights AI, traceability, and AI search in 2026 Innovation Awards: At VivaTech 2026, LVMH named three startups shaping the future of luxury: Fairly Made for supply chain traceability and environmental impact measurement, Synthesia for AI-powered multilingual training and communication videos, and Bluefish AI for helping brands optimize their visibility across AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. LVMH executives emphasized that the luxury industry is shifting from traditional SEO to “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” as consumers increasingly use AI tools to discover brands and products. The awards reflect LVMH’s growing focus on applying AI across the luxury value chain.

• Reformation prepares for a public market debut: Reformation is reportedly gearing up for an IPO as early as July 2026, with plans to confidentially file as soon as next week. Founded in 2009 as a vintage clothing boutique, the Los Angeles-based label is expected to generate more than $500 million in revenue this year across categories including apparel, footwear, handbags, swimwear, and jewelry. Backed by private equity firm Permira since 2019, Reformation has grown from a DTC sustainability pioneer into a global retail brand, recently expanding beyond the U.S. with new stores in Toronto, London, and Paris. The potential IPO signals continued investor confidence in fashion brands that successfully combine sustainability messaging, strong brand identity, and international growth.

• Toteme expands into menswear as growth accelerates: Swedish luxury label Toteme will launch its first-ever menswear collection in August 2026, marking a major category expansion for the minimalist fashion brand. The debut line will include ready-to-wear, footwear, and accessories while translating Toteme’s signature understated aesthetic into menswear. The move comes as the brand continues its international retail expansion and builds on approximately €200 million in annual sales.

• L’Oréal partners with OpenAI to reinvent beauty discovery and consumer insights: At VivaTech 2026, L’Oréal announced a new partnership with OpenAI aimed at accelerating AI-powered beauty experiences across its brands and operations. The collaboration will help L’Oréal develop more personalized consumer journeys, enhance product discovery, and leverage generative AI to better understand evolving beauty trends and customer needs.

• Target taps Isaac Mizrahi to lead its next chapter of accessible design: Target has appointed designer Isaac Mizrahi as its first-ever Creative Director at Large, a newly created role that reunites the retailer with the designer who helped pioneer high-low fashion collaborations through Target’s landmark 2002 partnership. Mizrahi will advise design teams, mentor creative talent, and shape storytelling across categories including fashion, home, wellness, and food as Target works to strengthen its design identity and merchandising strategy. The appointment comes as the retailer seeks to reignite growth after a 1.7% sales decline in 2025, with leadership betting on stronger design differentiation, faster product cycles, and year-round product drops to help Target reclaim its reputation as a destination for stylish, affordable products.

Have thoughts/opinions/questions on any of the above? Let’s discuss! Join the conversation at the link above.

With love and hot girl energy,

Cache 💚

Last month, my radar spotlighted brands founded by mothers, women who built businesses while already doing the hardest job in the world. Mother's Day felt like the perfect moment to celebrate the women who make everything possible.

This month, we’re dressing with a little extra flair. As we know, June is Pride Month, and there’s no better time to celebrate the kind of style that refuses to shrink. This edition of On My Radar is dedicated to dopamine dressing. These sustainable brands are living proof that fashion is fun, expressive, and an art form.

1. Tyler McGillivary

If you loved playing dress-up when you were younger, Tyler McGillivary is your brand. Founded in 2019 by Brooklyn-based designer Tyler McGillivary, the label draws inspiration from old cartoons, rare botanical catalogues, vintage furniture, folklore, and science fiction. Each piece is designed to evoke nostalgia and act as a reflection of the planet and the wonder of the everyday, described as "portals to the past and companions for the future.

After her debut New York Fashion Week runway show in February 2025, Tyler McGillivary is officially one to watch. All clothing and textiles are sourced and produced ethically in India, Hong Kong, and New York City, with select pieces made in collaboration with Ella Mae, the next brand on this list :)

2. Ella Mae

Founded in 2021 by designer Ella Mae who has been sewing since age six, the Los Angeles label is rooted in a “Earth first” philosophy. That belief, deepened by a degree in Apparel Design with a concentration in Nature, Culture, and Sustainability Studies, shapes every decision the brand makes, from silhouette to dye. The studio uses dyes made from rust, botanical roots, and food waste.

Working in small batches from deadstock and natural fibers, Mae hand-drafts the majority of her patterns and sews samples in-house, treating each garment as what she calls a “wearable offering,” something made to be treasured for a lifetime, not just for a season. Mae redefines modern whimsy through a lens of romantic utilitarianism.

3. Eternally Curious

Eternally Curious is the rare brand that makes you feel like fashion was invented just for you. The Los Angeles label, founded by designer Charlotte Irvin, lives at the intersection of radical inclusivity, high fashion, and ethical consumerism. The label draws inspiration from the punk irreverence of Vivienne Westwood, the maximalist joy of Betsey Johnson, and the unabashedly glittery universe of early 2000s pop culture. The result is couture that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but takes its craft very seriously indeed. Every piece is made to order in a tiny Los Angeles studio by Charlotte and a small team of designers, cut from vintage and deadstock fabrics in custom measurements.

4. Rhi Dancey

Rhi Dancey is more than a fashion brand, it's a movement. The London-based label started from a living room and a Depop page during Covid lockdown by Welsh designer Rhi Dancey. What sets Rhi Dancey apart from every other cool sustainable label is the intention behind the community. Through pop-ups, workshops, and intimate events, the brand actively creates space for women and diverse artists to collaborate, create, and be seen, dismantling the hierarchy and gatekeeping that defines so much of the fashion industry. When you buy Rhi Dancey, you're buying into something bigger than an outfit.

5. Charles Jeffery Loverboy

Charles Jeffrey Loverboy didn’t start on a runway, it started on a dance floor. Founded by Scottish designer Charles Jeffrey in 2015, the gender-fluid label was born out of a monthly queer club night in Dalston, East London, where fashion students and artists came together to dress up, push boundaries, and celebrate the transformative power of getting dressed. Every collection since has carried the energy of that room.

The aesthetic pulls from punk, glam rock, and Scottish heritage, filtered through the lens of London’s queer underground. The cult-favorite Ears beanies and signature tartan pieces have been worn by Harry Styles, Tilda Swinton, and BTS, and the brand has collaborated with Vivienne Westwood, Maison Margiela, and John Galliano. The label has definetly earned its place at the very top of the industry.

6. Official Rebrand

Official Rebrand is a love letter to everything the fashion industry throws away. Founded by New York-based non-binary artist MI Legette, the label transforms deadstock materials into one-of-a-kind gender-fluid pieces that feel like wearable art. The name says it all, this is fashion reborn.

Every piece features hand-painted abstract artwork and empowering slogan graphics, making each garment as visually striking as it is politically intentional. Nothing is mass produced, nothing is repeated, and nothing ends up in a landfill. Official Rebrand consistently produces some of the most covetable and collectible pieces in the sustainable fashion space.

If you’ve shopped any of the brands above, I’d love to hear about it. There’s something really special about discovering pieces with a story and passing that joy along. I hope this sparked a few new tabs, saved searches, or secondhand hunts—and if it did, consider this your nudge to share the love and keep it going.

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With love & hot girl energy,

Navya Kilaru