Dive into The Cult World of Invitation-Only Shopping
HOT GIRLS AT THE TRUNK SHOW: elite-level shopping is major inside baseball
Yesterday, my dear friend Noora Raj Brown and I had a perfect Noora-and-Jess day. I swear, in New York City, there is always another level to unlock. Living in whatever cross-section of taste you prefer can be a real pursuit, a hobby akin to skiing or Mahjong, if you play it right. The sport of acquisition. Yesterday was a perfect collision of niche access, deep fashion knowledge, and two hard-working, like-minded collectors telling one another, “You deserve it.”
(Get ready, a lot of what we did yesterday had a bizarre thru-line connected to the Olsen’s design universe. Not intentionally, but now that I’m writing it all down, I’m laughing. Spiritually, they were present.)
Honestly, our schedule reads like a thesis for this newsletter’s entire existence. The rest of the day is where it gets interesting.
Welcome to the secretive world of invitation-only shopping.
It began with a quick meetup for coffee (whole dairy milk, no sugar) and to hail a cab, where Noora handed off four combs she sourced for me at Preclothed, which is right down the street from her apartment in Paris. Not just any combs, though — combs from The Row’s viral S/S ‘26 look book, a hairstyle dreamed up by the genius Guido Palau. I plan to do a version of the look for my rehearsal dinner. (Preclothed is a favorite of Ashley and Mary-Kate, and where many of the items in The Row’s Galerie are sourced from.)
I wore a Limoges chopstick in my hair, twisted into a knot on my head. It was a gift from The Row last year, and in hindsight it was a preview into their forthcoming public fascination with vintage hair ephemera.
We rode uptown to the Attersee Studio, where Noora had items on hold that couldn’t ship to Paris. We immediately greeted designer Isabel Wilkinson Schor, who was living in her requisite elegance, donning a past-season silk coat. Noora ended up with a cashmere top, wanting to also go home with the brand’s cult tassel belt, but it had already been gobbled up. We petted the brand’s table linen collaboration with Loretta Caponi and I again coveted the cocktail napkins.
We were there to see Yaser Shaw, in town for only a few days for a tiny trunk show at Attersee. Shaw is a fifth-generation textile designer known for handcrafted Kashmiri cashmere shawls that blend old-world technique with more contemporary, graphic motif work. He does not have e-commerce. A single shawl can take up to two years to make. (You may have clocked his work in this photo of Jennifer Lawrence, or this photo of Mary-Kate Olsen.) I walked right into the WSJ’s Lane Florsheim who was chatting with Yaser and cooing over his work with the rest of us. (As Kaitlin Phillips pointed out, Shaw was recently in The New York Times spinning a yarn of his own.)
Yaser Shaw was carried at Tiina in Amagansett, which is where I originally became familiar with the line. If you knew the store, (it has since closed, and now The Row Amagansett is housed in the building) it made sense in that very specific Tiina way: hyper–considered, craft-forward, what I’d call “spiritually luxe”. His shawls made sense alongside the kind of pieces owner Tiina Laakkonen gravitated toward — slow, emotionally-resonant — things that felt intellectually grounded.
Right as we walked out, Leandra Medine Cohen walked in, and after I greeted her I spied her bag: “The Melt” by a new line called The Veil. I clocked it because I had been introduced to co-founder Adwoa Aboah last week at a trunk show for Carolina Irving & Daughters where Adowa had all her sparkly, swishy bags laid out to ogle and shop. The Veil is so named because many of the brand’s “Snap” bag, which apt to its name, presents a core silhouette with interchangeable “veils” (covers) and a removable chain, allowing a limitless array of styling possibilities.
Noora and I walked downstairs to the Invisible Collection and looked at all the Jean-Michel Franc waiting for someone to pluck it up. I could see Noora’s inspiration wheels turning for her interior design clients.
We encountered more of Franc’s work at The Row — a stoic iron drinks table (which immediately made me think of Alissa Kapito’s breathtaking townhouse renovation in AD). We hoofed it up Madison to the townhouse, where my favorite sales associate, Grace, was waiting with a smile after text-baiting me with new arrivals that morning.
I tried on a capelet that didn’t quite work for me but found a fantastic python pouch that Grace produced from the back. Noora ended up with even more fantastic red eel loafers. I have to say, the Donegal speckle pieces in particular are really exemplary from this resort season. (I loved The Ceiling’s deep dive into that here.)
While at The Row, Noora also tried the brand’s black silk Erdene coat, which the twins (now famously) wore to accept their CFDA award this year. As the internet has repeatedly noted, they styled it with a vintage art deco Cartier brooch from Macklowe and a citrine and diamond Cartier collar from F.D. Gallery.
After that, I got to be the first person to take Noora to Zitomer! If you’re not familiar, Zitomer is a quirky long-standing Upper East Side pharmacy and specialty store known for its erudite selection. We bought the most niche thing imaginable, matching fur-trimmed claw clips Zitomer manufactured in collaboration with NYC furrier Pologeorgis. “Friendship clips!” Noora laughed.
Zitomer is full of wonderful things you never knew you needed. I also got a diamond polishing cloth and earring backs specifically engineered to keep your jewelry from falling off. Noora got a darling ballerina Christmas ornament for her daughter. I saw a woman buying one of these, which if Substack is to be believed, are about to have a fashion moment. (I am aligned.)
We walked across the street to The Carlyle after that. Re/See was having a trunk show behind locked doors in a suite on the eighth floor, and true to form, they brought a good selection of Phoebe Philo-era Celine with them. We tried on lots of things, and Noora ended up finding not only the Prada dress she’s going to wear to my wedding, but also an incredible color blocked Phoebe-era mink coat.
The coat is from Celine’s F/W ‘12 collection, which I remember distinctly as a moment Phoebe Philo downshifted her energy into the quiet force we now know her to be. By then, she knew she’d won. She was pregnant with her third child, more established with less to prove, and even less into the spectacle.
I remember this collection so distinctly because it coincided with a broader cultural shift: women were rejecting overt sexiness and trend churn. Philo at the time was a designer at the height of her influence. I remember it being one of the first times I felt like there was a place for me in fashion, like someone was out there speaking for me.
Oversized drop-shoulder coats dominated that collection — especially versions with leather half-belts (“martingales”) that added swagger and structural punctuation. Honestly, I think you can trace a straight line from this collection to The Row’s later dominance, Khaite’s early restraint, and the long reign of “expensive minimalism”.
Anyway, the jewelry trays were where I encountered trouble at Re/See. The first thing I clocked were a pair of rare 1960’s Hellenistic gold earrings by Ilias Lalaounis (sold, curses). The next was a ruby and diamond ring that Noora and I both loved but left behind.
The final was a teeny tiny 18k gold original-era Cartier Panthère watch, which is what finally broke my will. It just looked too perfect with my existing jewelry, worn almost more as a bracelet than a watch, and felt very evenly weighted. The case back engraving confirmed its provenance; produced in Paris and not one of the later-outsourced, post-Richemont mass revival reissues. It is circa late 1980s to early–mid 1990s — so right when I was born, which means we are around the same age! It’s so special and feels like it has always been mine.
That purchase sent me thinking about designer Anne Marie Beretta. She is credited with shaping the design language of the Panthère de Cartier in the 1980s. Her Panthère was not about symbolism or the animal itself, but about urban fluidity and to be dead honest, social ease. (There’s a good mention of her and some other fun/nerdy Cartier lore in Late Filing’s interview with Sourcewhere’s Erica Wright).
Thinking more about it, her ethos emerged from a very specific French post-war design culture — one that valued utility and permanence over fantasy. So it all sort of connects, doesn’t it? (I feel like her work belongs to the same intellectual family as Jean Prouvé or Charlotte Perriand even though her peers at the time were Alaïa, Yohji, Issey, and Jil Sander.)
Anyway, when she did the Panthère, she kind of removed “watch logic” from the watch entirely which is pretty rad: she minimized the case and made it so that the face was subordinate to the body, and gave it soft links that drape like fabric. It’s like, “time is present, we see her, but she’s in the background, we can’t be too bothered.” I saw someone online say that they didn’t like the mini Panthère because they could “barely read the time”, and I just thought, well babe, that whoosh you just heard was the entire point flying over your head.
(TL/DR, this watch is for the girls. John Mayer types and their gearhead collector friends would never fuck w/ it.)
Maybe Phoebe Philo is Beretta’s philosophical heir. They share a lot of sensibilities: that clothing should serve the wearer’s life, that luxury should register as confidence not decoration. Both women reject novelty as progress or gauche visibility as success. The Row’s principles map here too: materials over message, cut over concept, no cameras please.
Beretta had her own line too, which still drifts in bits on sites like Vestiaire and 1stDibs. It’s a fun fashion/architectural rabbit hole to go down, tabs open alongside her peers like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, because Beretta conceals construction while someone like Kawakubo exposes it. Tension!
We did a lot of walking yesterday, which really put my new shoes to the test, a pair of fur-lined “Big Booties” (name, lol) by CHRISTEN. I’ve talked about her a lot here, but Nina Christen really is the secret sauce of the shoe world and has been for a long time. Yes, she designed stuff for Phoebe Philo and The Row (not the jelly though, that was Trevor Houston who is now helming Herbert Levine). She also did the infamous Lido sandal for Bottega and many, many other iconic shoes that anyone even slightly online would know. She’s also running the footwear show at Jonathan Anderson’s new vision for Dior. She is busy.
But CHRISTEN is her line. She’s doing exactly what she wants there, and you can tell — but that’s married with genuine technical skill and a bevy of relationships to incredible factories that many fledgling lines could only dream of. As a result, the shoes are good, good in the truest sense, from construction to plain good looks. I just don’t know another way to put it. And I can attest first-hand that they are comfortable right out of the box.
Still, I was happy to sit and get off my feet for a quick lunch at Dowling’s before we headed wayyy down to Tribeca. Our last stop of the day was at AGMES’ showroom, where they were hosting a small holiday market comprised of friends like Heirlome, Liffner, and Maison d’Etto.
Once we were buzzed up, the first face I saw was Gregory Mitola of Etagere PR, who has a killer stable of indie clients and whose genuine love for what he does rings clear as a bell. He rattled off some new things 6397 and Colleen Allen were going and made sure we saw the work of jewelry designer Alice Waese before gushing about hush-hush jewelry wheeler/dealer Susie Hoimes of MDVII.
The clothing and objects we bring into our lives carry importance, and they connect us to one another in story and provenance. Look at how many mental and social tendrils unfurled from just one day of shopping with a friend! They remind us that taste is not static or solitary — it’s accumulated, shared, and (most importantly) shaped by the people and places whose lives we touch.
 | A guest post by
|
Sounds like a dream day of shopping and discovery- the best! Congrats on the watch xx
Fantastic breakdown of the trunk show economy. The Yaser Shaw detail about two years per shawl perfectly captures why invitation-only access works, scarcity is real not manufactured. Worked in luxury adjacent spaces and the best pieces never hit shelves they move thru these closed loops. The Panthère watch context was chef's kiss, Anne Marie Beretta removing 'watch logic' from the design is exactly the kind of thing most people would miss.