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When I log on to Zoom with Jennifer Arlt, a fashion collector based in Germany, she apologizes and explains she just needs to make a purchase before we get started with the interview. “While I was waiting for you, I was checking my resale app and I saw a very, very special item that I really quickly need to buy. Give me one second,” she says, tapping on her phone. “That’s the big issue when you’re a collector. You never know when these items show up and you don’t want to risk losing them.” The must-have in question? A Marc by Marc Jacobs blue pleated houndstooth skirt that Blair Waldorf wears in season two, episode eight of Gossip Girl, which aired on October 27, 2008.
In terms of vintage collecting, the number of people who want a skirt from Marc Jacobs’s diffusion line from 2008 is likely smaller than the number of people who, say, want John Galliano–era Dior (the RealReal says searches for the latter have increased 263% year over year). But having spoken with several Gossip Girl resellers and buyers before meeting with Arlt, I’m hardly surprised at the urgency. Instead, I’m more focused on Arlt’s tan lace dress with a distinct white ruffle collar. It’s one of the holy grail dresses for a Gossip Girl collector: the Marc by Marc Jacobs “Dita” dress that Blair wears in the first Thanksgiving episode.
“I haven't sold one for less than $650 in a couple of years, but I've been able to find a few. So it's not even the rarest,” says Kimberly Anne, a Gossip Girl reseller who goes by the handle @WhatWaldorfWore on Instagram. “My dream dress that I’m still holding out for is, obviously, everyone wants the Dita dress,” says Ali Rice, a civil engineer who collects Gossip Girl clothes. “I have my own. I found it really early, thank God,” says Nina Kulikovska, another reseller by the handle @Waldorf_In_Midtown. “I wore it to last Thanksgiving, and I'm currently selling two of the Dita dresses.” If you’re a size 2, you can get it for $840 (plus shipping) on Vestiaire Collective as well.
Originally sold for $428, the dress would cost around $563 with inflation today. Though in general you expect secondhand clothing to sell for a little less, the Dita has reached cult status among a growing dedicated following of Gossip Girl collectors and resellers. Never mind that the 2010s haven’t come back in style, never mind that Blair last appeared in a new outfit in 2012—for these die-hards, costume designer Eric Daman’s style has never waivered. It probably helps that Blair’s outfits were pretty conservative, and now that many fans of the show the first time around are in their late 20s to mid 30s, they’re looking for smart, feminine dresses, blouses, and pencil skirts to wear to the office or a cocktail party rather than an Hervé Leger bandage dress. The combination of that, Gossip Girl being available on Netflix during the early days of the pandemic, and the buzz around the reboot has led to an increase in buyers and sellers. And, though 2007 fashion hasn’t come back full force like that of the early Y2K era, there’s signs that it’s around the corner.
Anne was one of the early resellers. When the show first aired, she was fresh out of college, working as a financial news copy editor, and part of a community on LiveJournal that chronicled the fashion credits on Gossip Girl. Ten years later, she started poking around on eBay to see if she could find any of the clothes, and her business was born. “In the little Poshmark and eBay community, not to toot my own horn, but people have called me the OG of reselling,” she says. Armed with saved searches for key pieces, she gives me the lay of the land. The most popular pieces are three Marc by Marc Jacobs dresses: the Dita dress, the green lace “Mia” dress that Blair wears when she first hooks up with Chuck Bass, and the white “Joelle” grosgrain ribbon bandage dress Blair wears to the Vitamin Water party in the season two premiere. Of those, the Mia is the most rare. “Any Blair dress is the most in-demand,” Anne says. “More so than Serena. Sorry Serena.” The rarest pieces include the moschino cherry-printed dress that Blair wears while in Paris (in this instance, Serena’s outfit—a peachy, caged dress—is equally in demand). “That one I’ve never seen for sale,” Anne says.
Anne’s seen a boom in resellers over the past 18 months, which she attributes to the pandemic. Kulikovska started her store two years ago, and has already seen price inflation. “When I first started, there weren't that many people in it. I felt like only a few people had the pieces or knew ways to find new pieces,” she says. “At the time, I thought they were already expensive, you know? So over a year when I started looking for myself and when I started selling, I noticed it kind of differs. There are people in this who are overpricing heavily, like heavily.”
Fair pricing is a constant debate, one that can never be definitively settled, since it comes down to what people are willing to pay. The allure of looking a bit more like Blair Waldorf is worth far more than the actual value of an old Zara cape. Kulikovska bought hers for $200, which she considers a reasonable price. When I asked her about a listing I saw for the same piece at $400, she says it’s too much. “Obviously the jacket might have been at the store for $50 or $60, and it’s already appreciated to $200. That’s a lot of appreciation,” she says. “I guess there’s always going to be a buyer for that. There’s always a die-hard fan.” Anne agrees. “I have seen Zara cape sell for a lot of money. I don't think I could do that, ethically. It's just like, it's from Zara. It's not worth $600 or whatever.”
Some items are worth it, though. In the past, Kulikovska sold a Mia dress for $1,750, but considers the Dita priced at $1,200 to be too much. “I sold the Mia for a lot of money,” she says. “That’s probably three times what the actual dress cost in the store, brand new. But it’s an iconic dress. It’s the episode where Blair left Nate and got with Chuck. It was such a big deal. This dress elevated its value.”
Sizing can also inflate the price even more. “It’s hard for me, being like a curvy girl,” Rice says. “I normally wear a size 12, maybe 10 sometimes. So that makes everything that much more difficult.” Kulikovska explains that, although she’s familiar with what sizes she wears in each brand featured heavily on the show, sometimes people will buy larger sizes to get them tailored down and make sure they fit. “If a size 12 [Joelle dress] was ever available, I assume it can go for $1,500,” she says. “But I’ve never seen a size 12.”
The fear of being sold a fake is greater than the fear of being overcharged. But that’s where the seller and buyers community aspect helps. Rice frequently buys from Anne and has turned to Kulikovska to ask if other sellers’ listings seem legit. Kulikovska told her that $700 for an Alice and Olivia dress from season two was too much, but that the listing Rice found for a Nanette Lepore cocktail dress was fair and looked real. It’s a small community. Anne and Kulikovska are friends; Arlt talks frequently with a collector who also makes dupes of impossible-to-find dresses, like the moschino cherry-printed dress. “We are messaging almost daily, trading items, and talking about items that just showed up,” Arlt says. “I’m really grateful about that.”
Ultimately, sentimentality and celebrity are uniquely able to warp the value of fashion. The “real value” of the Mia dress went out the window the moment Leighton Meester put it on to become Blair Waldorf. Funnily enough, Daman collaborated with Depop sellers to create storefronts on the app for each of the reboot’s characters (the items are inspired by their style, rather than the actual pieces). It makes sense, as all the characters in the reboot have their own, IRL social media account. It also proves that the clothes make the characters as much as the lines. *Gossip Girl—*the books, the show, and the reboot—were always aspirational. Rice tells me that her hobby allows her to step into the character’s shoes, literally, if not figuratively. “That’s not the background I come from. My parents worked minimum wage jobs, so I didn’t grow up with luxury or anything like that,” she says. “Now I work as a civil engineer, so I have that budget now where I’m like, ‘Oh, these clothes I saw years ago, I’m able to relive that and have my own collection.’ I’m able to look back and see those photos and be like, ‘I have that now.’”