For Celebrities, the Cheapest Thrill Now Is Cleaning Out Their Closets

Chloë was one star who made a party out of ensuring her trove of items was lovingly re-homed. Liana teamed up with the Feud actor to throw one big shebang, freeing the fashionista of racks upon racks of chic garments. Liana considers Chloë a “trailblazer” in the celebrity secondhand sale sphere. It girl–eternal that she is, Chloë was early to the celebrity closet sale trend and garnered plenty of press from her event last May—though let the record show that in the broader sphere of celebrity stoop sales, Martha Stewart has been in these (rural New York) streets; her 2022 tag sale predates this recent wardrobe-specific wave.

Chloë’s closet clean-out was billed as “the sale of the century.” The shoppers who lined up at 6 a.m. in order to score first dibs on her offerings would likely agree with that phrasing. “I used to sell my stuff in front of my house, on the stoop,” she told W at the event. “And then I met Liana. She helped me do a closet sweep and said, ‘I’ve just done a sale with Sally [Singer] and Lynn [Yaeger]. Why don’t we do a major blowout storage wars?’” One attendee described poring through Chloë’s archive of goodies to visiting a museum. With the actor hanging out on a couch as shoppers looked around, it might’ve had the atmosphere of your average stoop sale, had it not been for the autograph signing and the New York Times coverage.

Liana thinks the string of starry secondhand sales might be bigger than your average trend that pops up and fades out with the season. “I don’t know if it [should be] chalked up to a trend, or if is this is just the new platform to do it,” she says. Tired: Lining up around the block to shop a sample sale. Wired: Lining up around the block for a pre-owned sale where you get to (1) meet Chloë Sevigny, and (2) go home with a piece of fashion history.

The appeal for fans is obvious, but the functions are a win-win. In our culture of consumption, many of us normies end up accumulating a bunch of stuff; multiple that by 1,000 when you consider the life of a big-name actor or singer, who’s professionally costumed for public viewing eight days a week in addition to being frequently gifted by brands. Caitlin Jaymes, a stylist and professional organizer in LA, sees firsthand every day how crowded celeb closets fits into her work with top-tier talents like Glen Powell and Madison Beer. She started out just doing styling and personal shopping before helping clients edit their wardrobes became “a huge niche” in her business.

“The main thing I’ve noticed with celebrities is that they want this really big separation between their everyday wardrobe and their glam wardrobe,” Caitlin explains. “I did a pretty big celebrity [closet] in February, and I told their assistant, ‘I don’t even know if I can say yes to this project, just so much in here.’ And she told me, ‘No, no, let her know—she will get rid of things!’ Half of their job is also to be on trend and wearing things that the world hasn’t seen. But celebrities are just like us, they really are: They don’t want the clutter.”