Why Reformation Sells Old Gap Miniskirts for $128
The value placed on Y2K vintage (yes, it's vintage now) is reaching a new high.
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Quick announcement before we get into today’s story! I’m doing two talks and signings for my new NYT bestselling book ANNA: The Biography in the L.A. area. First, I’m talking Anna with Cameron Silver at Decades vintage boutique on October 24 at 6 p.m. Seating is limited and spots are filling up! Then, I’ll be in Palm Springs on October 28 at 2 p.m. for the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival. I hope to see Back Row readers there!
When Katie Levans was browsing Reformation’s vintage boutique on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles recently, her jaw dropped at the price tags. Denim mini skirts by Gap and Paris Blues were each $128. Even one from Old Navy was $88. A gray-and-red plaid skirt by Express was also $128, while a striped Limited top was $98. Levans took out her phone and made a TikTok, in which she described these prices as “[f]ully unhinged.”
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“It's one thing to see that at Goodwill — of course we should be reusing clothing — but to see $128 price tag on Gap and Old Navy, from the 2000s mind you, makes no sense to me,” she later told me in an interview. Similar complaints can be found on Twitter.
Levans, who sells vintage sweatshirts she refinishes herself for $68, could tell the products were tapping into the Y2K trend. Y2K signatures were all over the recent spring 2023 runway shows, evident in tiny tops with bulky cargo pants seen everywhere from Diesel to Dior. But the trend had already been thriving at retail; even trucker hats that cost $195 are sold out at Gallery Dept. (The site does have a slew of bucket hats ranging from $495 to $750 still available.)
Reformation’s prices for authentic Y2K pieces certainly reflect a premium for the brand. But they also reflect its vintage team’s tedious sourcing process and the sheer — if surprising — desirability of the likes of denim mini skirts millennials bought as teenagers at the mall for $39.99.
Reformation, long a popular brand with millennial shoppers, began as a vintage store in L.A. in 2009, started by Yael Aflalo (she resigned as CEO in 2020). In 2013, Aflalo decided to start making clothing and sold it directly to shoppers online. Though vintage remained part of the mix, it was quickly overshadowed by Reformation’s proprietary line, and the website’s revenue soared to more than $25 million in 2015.
Today, the Reformation brand is known for its sexy, slightly quirky, retro-flavored vibe that suggests the Reformation girl simply doesn’t try to be this hot. For around $200 to $400, customers can get a dress that’s perfect to wear to a wedding or party, but not quite appropriate for the office. From Reformation’s early days, before its competitors were rushing to do the same, the company advertised its clothes as being ethically made at its own factory in Los Angeles with fabrics that were better for the planet than the bulk of what was out there.
Secondhand clothing is a logical component of that ethos, and has seemed to become an increasingly significant part of Reformation’s business. The brand’s L.A. store used to have just around 40 vintage pieces at a time, now the vintage stock has its own dedicated retail space. In New York’s Lower East Side Reformation and London’s Shore Ditch location, nearly a third of the stock is now vintage. (A Reformation spokesperson declined to provide more exact figures on how the vintage business is performing.)
The current thrift and vintage market is shaped by a confluence of Gen Z desires. This generation is widely credited with leading the boom for resold clothing, often out of concerns over sustainability. Online secondhand clothing platform Depop reports that 90 percent of its active users are under age 26. And in 2021, investment bank Jefferies projected the $30 billion secondhand clothing market would grow 18 percent through 2024. Gen Z is also credited with (or, you might say, blamed for, depending on your age) newly popularizing the Y2K trend.
Reformation vintage buyer Alicia Siemens described Y2K as “a really strong-selling trend” for around a year now. “I personally am also a Millennial, and it was really hard at first for me to wrap my brain around it. I was like, What do you mean? Low-rise denim? I don't understand, I thought we were all going to leave this in the past,” she said. “And it's being translated super, super literally. It's not like you take a little bit of this and translate it in a modern way.”
Siemens described feeling something like a rush when she finds the perfect piece. “When I'm out buying, it's almost like a game to find the most Y2K thing I can find. I'm not personally wearing it,” she said, “but I'm like, Oh my god, yes, this green-wash, stretchy, low-rise, flared denim — this is it.”
Reformation sources much of its vintage from wholesalers called raghouses. These are secretive businesses that you have to be in the vintage sourcing business to know about. One vintage merchant told me that some charge a down payment of up to $1,000 just to walk in the doors. Their methods of sourcing are kept secret, but much of their stock is thought to come from donated clothing.
Some raghouses pre-sort stock into say, sixties or cashmere, but that barely makes a dent for a buyer like Siemens. She still spends five or so hours at a time sifting through dense bales of clothing that she described as as tall as her and as wide as she is tall. She dresses in cargo pants and a tank top knowing she’s going to end up sweaty and dirty. “You have to love the hunt,” she said.
And the hunt for ideal Y2K clothing often means resurrecting the mall. “Sometimes we are debating these brands,” she said. “Like, can we buy Abercrombie? Is Abercrombie vintage? And looking at the label — is this an older Abercrombie label or is it not?” (She cited Express as another brand Reformation’s team of three vintage buyers commonly questions.)
The chosen pieces are sent to be cleaned and then, if necessary, repaired by one of two seamstresses at Reformation’s L.A. factory. Some pieces are upcycled, meaning the pouf sleeve on an eighties prom dress might be turned into a laced corset crop top. Prices are set based on quality (silk will be more expensive than rayon) plus market demand for the style. Last year, for instance, Siemens said the price of Levi’s 501s went up at wholesale and the store couldn’t keep them in stock. She noted that some items, like concert T-shirts, sell for thousands of dollars, and that Reformation sells some vintage pieces for less than market value.
The clothes are then displayed in a Reformation store by a separate team. “They outfit the racks — there's a top in front of a skirt that would go totally great together,” she said. “There's a styling element that we're providing.”
Many experts agree that true vintage clothing must be at least 20 years old, so something that came out in 2002 would technically qualify. However, the dawn of the millennium also marked the rise of fast fashion, meaning the quality of a lot of clothing declined after the nineties.
Vintage merchant and Ally Bird vintage owner Alessandra Canario specializes in clothes from the 1930s through 1970s, which she described as increasingly challenging to source. She added, “Selling those Y2K pieces and the modern pieces that are easier to find is just a much more sustainable business model.” She didn’t necessarily see the point in buying Y2K items from Reformation over, say, Depop, but noted that “in some ways, it’s good that corporations are offering the option to buy secondhand and making it more readily available.” Still, she wishes consumers would buy from smaller merchants rather than larger companies like Reformation.
Sustainable fashion influencer Aja Barber, author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism, wrote in an email that Reformation’s prices seemed “absolutely ridiculous,” but added that “people have to understand that some vintage prices should be a little higher just because folks DO NOT like accounting for the time it takes to source stuff. Going into a gross warehouse and digging around for the goods. That is something a lot of folks do not have the time, nor the patience or stamina for.”
Vintage expert Virginia Chamlee, author of Big Thrift Energy, said in an email, “If you visit any thrift store in America today, you can leave with a bag full of merchandise from the mall-era brands of the early aughts. Of course, if you don't feel like digging, maybe it's worth it for you to just buy the higher-priced piece that someone else found for you.” She noted that if she’s right that the unbranded $118 Vintage York Dress on Reformation’s site is by New York & Co., a similar style can be purchased for $7.95 on eBay. (Siemens said, “We note a brand [on the site] if we think it adds value.”)
Even as someone who spends an inordinate amount of time looking at fashion images compared to the average person (though I am very much a journalist and not a stylist), I probably wouldn’t look at that eBay dress and imagine it looking as polished as it does on Reformation’s site. Ultimately, I tend to think that making the world’s upsetting amount of clothing waste desirable and putting it back into circulation is a good thing, even if the Y2K vintage market sometimes reeks of capitalism. Reformation or other popular stores selling vintage might be a gateway for millennials like me, who shop their site but almost never buy vintage, into the thrift or vintage marketplace. This alone, of course, won’t save the planet, but could serve as an important indicator of consumer values to both corporations and the bodies that regulate them. Besides, when we buy clothing — whether we like it or not — the bulk of the money we spend is often for the brand versus the sheer cost of making the item.
Plus, millennials are probably repelled by $128 Paris Blues not only because of the price, but also because the Y2K trend is simply not for us. Many of us probably want to wear a bucket hat and low-rise jeans as much as we want to ingest sawdust.
Levans, who made the TikTok, said that she’s noticed the whole vintage marketplace in L.A. has shifted heavily recently to Y2K pieces, adding, “Maybe I need to buckle up and see there’s a new era of what vintage is.”
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"Many of us probably want to wear a bucket hat and low-rise jeans as much as we want to ingest sawdust."
I feel so heard and seen! I'm just glad I'm not alone!
That's the thing with vintage - it's a moving goalpost. Also all the discourse about vintage and secondhand shopping in fashion media (EDIT: barring Liana Satenstein at Vogue, afaik the only mainstream media fashion writer who seems to acknowledge old mall brands in the secondhand shopping context) tends to forget that once-cheap clothes can be wearable and good-quality vintage too, it isn't all one of a kind unique silk tea dresses and/or 1970s Halston/80s Bill Blass/Lacroix/Yohji, it will someday also end up being those Gap stripey jumpers (already is) and that Topshop skirt that every girl wanted in the summer of 2008. Just as it is for, say, vintage 501s and 60s high street brand Biba - that stuff wasn't meant to be expensive when it was first sold, but it is now.
(I hope the youths haven't started calling the American Apparel look 'y2k' though - it was 00s, but later 00s, and that whole hipster look that's now been renamed indie sleaze, arose and got popular at least in part as a direct backlash against late 90s-early 00s styles. Calling the resulting mid-late 00s retro-influenced looks 'y2k' would be like calling a punk a hippie.)