Late-night appointments with Offset and Cardi B! Trading Rick Owens for Balenciaga! The secondhand trade in upmarket men’s wear is booming.
In a floor-through loft in SoHo one Friday night in January, Vincent Ferraro was selling luxury clothing. Sort of.
On one side of the room, a tattoo artist covered a young woman’s palm in an illustration of a bankroll. Some people flipped casually through the racks of Chrome Hearts and Enfants Riches Déprimés, but Mr. Ferraro — sinewy, with a shaved head and covered in tattoos — didn’t pay them much mind. Instead, he poured shots of Patrón, posed for Instagram photos and occasionally disappeared with one of the several women who had come to vie for his attention.
On the men’s resale clothing site Grailed, Mr. Ferraro, who before the pandemic worked in nightlife, most recently as general manager and creative director of Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel, sells under the handle 4GSELLER, and in the last couple of years, has become the go-to for rare Chrome Hearts, recent-season Louis Vuitton statement pieces and thrashed vintage dirtbag T-shirts, building a business that he says has annual revenue in the low seven figures.
“I did take, like, a big page out of what I did hospitality-wise and integrate it into what I’m doing,” Mr. Ferraro, 32, said a few weeks before the party, relaxing in the showroom one afternoon in a Yankees fitted cap, white T-shirt and Louis Vuitton ski pants. On the couch next to him he had a small pile of new Chrome Hearts inventory, and one piece in particular stood out: heavyweight black leather cargo pants with exaggerated pockets and built-to-last hardware.
The pants had an original retail price, he said, of around $6,000 to $7,000, but he was planning on listing them for north of $20,000. “The guy who got these waited a year,” he noted, referring to the sometimes lengthy wait for Chrome Hearts orders. “But people aren’t coming here to wait a year. They’re coming to walk out with them right now. So there’s a value to that.”
Still, $20,000 is a few mortgage payments, a diamond necklace, a painting, maybe a small car. Is there no sticker shock?
“I sold three of these already,” he said, not even blinking.
Welcome to the wild world of men’s luxury resale, which has begun to boom in recent years, owing in large part to the graduation of the young male customer who came of age in the era of limited-edition sneakers and Supreme items as asset classes, and for whom hip-hop icons and sports superstars are also high-fashion heroes.
All of those trends have primed the pump for the luxury men’s resale market, which is broadening rapidly, a growth captured in sellers like Mr. Ferraro; Justin Reed, whose Los Angeles showroom has become a celebrity playpen; and Luke Fracher, something of a modern garmento, who recently opened Luke’s, the first buy-sell-trade shop in New York for this generation of men’s luxury clothing.
“We’re seeing the streetwear-ification of high-end,” Mr. Fracher said over dinner in January at Ludlow House in Manhattan, a few blocks from his narrow-corridor shop just north of Dimes Square. Which is to say that the category of current men’s luxury isn’t Loro Piana and Kiton, but rather Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga, Chrome Hearts and Rick Owens, rare Nikes and archival Raf Simons.
That evolution has been unfolding for more than a decade. There’s an explicit through line from Riccardo Tisci’s invigoration of Givenchy in the early 2010s to Alessandro Michele’s psychedelic-tapestry rebrand of Gucci, to Kim Jones’s streamlining of Dior to, of course, Virgil Abloh’s up-from-spare-parts reconstruction of Louis Vuitton. And by remaking Nike and Vuitton simultaneously, Mr. Abloh implicitly linked their audiences, making clear that a luxury item is something people are willing to splurge on, regardless of which company made it.
Mr. Fracher, 34, was a founder of the Round Two empire, which during the 2010s turned the secondhand T-shirt trade into a multimillion-dollar concern with nine locations in five cities. He left Round Two last year and opened Luke’s in December, betting that some of the customer base that cut its teeth on streetwear and sneakers would be ready to upgrade to something fancier.
He also pointed to how insatiable social media feeds have created persistent and renewable demand for luxury clothing. “First of all, it’s the homogenization of how everyone dresses in every city across the world,” he said, emphasizing how clothing has become a globally spoken language. “And then it’s the need to flex nonstop and the need to have new clothing all the time, so you can post fit pics and get the dopamine hit and hopefully get some clout off it.”
Because he buys his inventory outright and has little room for storage, Mr. Fracher wants to move product quickly, most likely leaving him with thinner margins than those of Mr. Ferraro or Mr. Reed, who operate as showrooms with online presence.
Mr. Reed’s space, in a warehouse building in the downtown Los Angeles arts district, is bucolic and soothing, almost spalike. At the center of the main room sits a four-section de Sede Terrazza sofa from the early 1970s, still in its original beige leather, that he bought from a Hollywood producer. It’s been a fixture on his Instagram for a few years, giving him a unique, sophisticated visual identity as his website, which he started in 2017, was getting on its feet.
Now Mr. Reed, 35, is one of the most trusted names in men’s luxury resale. At his showroom, which during a December visit was decorated with a Givenchy surfboard, artwork by Joyce Pensato and a bench from the spring 2022 Louis Vuitton runway show, he entertains celebrity clients like the boxer Gervonta Davis, the Buffalo Bills wide receiver Stefon Diggs, the longtime fashion plate Luka Sabbat and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, point guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder, all memorialized in a wall of Polaroids. (Mr. Reed said that only about a quarter of his business comes from celebrity clients.)
Mr. Reed, in a St. John’s hoodie — his alma mater — and Balenciaga Strike boots, described himself as “a self-taught street kid.” Born and raised in New York, he sold photocopiers door to door before beginning to resell sneakers online in the mid-2010s. Once he began focusing on luxury men’s items, he effectively helped make the marketplace thanks to a sleek web presence and a reputation for sourcing rare pieces. Last year, he sold one of the only known jackets by Pastelle, an early Kanye West brand, to Kim Kardashian. Like Mr. Ferraro, he does brisk trade in Chrome Hearts, especially odd, rare items like a leather case for jumper cables, or a weight bench.
Unlike Mr. Ferraro, he runs most of his business on consignment — his 2022 revenue was approximately $8 million, he said, roughly doubling each year since 2019. His average website order is $1,300, he said, and around 100,000 people visit his site each month with almost no advertising.
Broadly speaking, hip-hop is to thank. Rappers began to embrace luxury fashion in the 1990s and 2000s just as the genre was muscling its way to the center of American pop music. By the 2000s, Kanye West and Pharrell Williams were deepening the ties between music and fashion, making way for the generation of ASAP Rocky and Tyler, the Creator, followed by Travis Scott and Playboi Carti. (This attitude has spilled over into professional sports, especially basketball and football, where players are now routinely filmed and photographed in the outfits they arrive at games wearing.)
