“Ever since I was a teenager, I hated the idea of wearing the same as someone else. I found my identity through vintage.”
Marie Blanchet of Mon Vintage. Instagram
Luxury vintage is booming, but it’s also an extremely fragmented market, with resale platforms like The RealReal and Vestiaire Collective offering a very different service to Mon Vintage. But even Blanchet’s niche is growing more competitive.
“I see new dealers pop up all the time,” she tells Life & Leisure from her Saint-Germain-des-Prés showroom.
“What I do requires a huge amount of persistence and expense to track down, buy and restore [pieces]. It’s my personal curation that differentiates Mon Vintage. It isn’t online either. I offer appointment-only, so you can visit, sit on the sofa with a cup of tea and feel at home. When I created this in November 2020, lockdown was hard on business and I knew that to do this well, it needed to be highly personal.”
For those unable to jet to Paris, Blanchet provides a lookbook on request. “We provide highly specific measurements and ship everywhere.”
She also co-curates vintage collections with partners like the New York-based luxury fashion brand The Row and Selfridges, with her (authenticated and restored) edits featured in their online stores. “I’m a big believer in mixing vintage with pieces from now,” she says. “One of my favourite pieces selected by The Row was a Balmain couture taffeta opera coat from the ’60s embroidered with coral.”
Blanchet won’t talk money, but that coat cost her a tidy sum. Likewise, her acquisition of a “museum-grade” 1980 Thierry Mugler bustier made of copper and worn by Jerry Hall on the runway cost the price of a luxury car.
Jennifer Grace of El Cycer wearing a vintage jumpsuit by Jean Paul Gaultier
It’s acquisitions like these that set Blanchet’s business apart. As do those of fashion archivist Jennifer Grace, founder of the California-based online luxury vintage store El Cycèr (the…
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