Dead Again: Vintage Fashion

Words by Faran Krentcil

When Camilla Morton can’t sleep, she searches on Google for pants. “Not just any pants,” says the London-based author and fashion consultant. “Daryl K low-rise black leather pants from 1995. I am obsessed with finding the perfect pair. But of course, you can’t just pop ‘round to Barneys anymore to purchase them. That label doesn’t really exist anymore. And, of course,” she sighs, “neither does Barneys.”

Morton is one of the “can you believe it?” British cool guard whose closet is crammed with archival Dior and Givenchy, all cribbed from her years as John Galliano’s official assistant and unofficial inner-beast wrangler. She remains BFFs — best fashion friends — with French luxury executives, Los Angeles movie stars, and members of the U.K. royal family. In other words, Morton does not need more designer clothes (“Yes, fine, I have too many already!” she admits with a small hoot) but the Daryl K pants remain lodged in her mind, a Roman Empire of soft black lambskin and a super-tight tush. “I could never find them in London, and this was before online shopping,” she explains. “They’re like a ghost of what I always wanted to wear.”

But ghosts are fully dead. The Daryl K pants in question are more like zombies — deceased from the runways and buried from retail racks, but still living on eBay, albeit for $600. They join a line of coveted clothes from long-defunct labels like Christopher Kane, Isaac Mizrahi, Imitation of Christ, Luella, and Todd Oldham that continue to have life even after their brands have died. “You used to have to buy everything up when a label closed,” says Morton. “But now, it’s like anytime my Gen X friends and I have a vivid memory of an item of clothing, we can go buy it straightaway.”

“Zombie fashion brands are definitely a thing,” says Liana Satenstein, the vintage expert and shopping writer. Satenstein’s celebrity closet sales and YouTube segments on fashion history have brought pieces from long-dormant brands like Opening Ceremony and Todd Oldham back into the spotlight, thanks to style icons like Chloë Sevigny. The rising demand for zombie fashion brands speaks to dual shopping trends: Y2K nostalgia fueled by both Gen X wistfulness and Gen Z TikTok content, along with a growing interest in sustainable fashion and its emphasis on secondhand shopping. Because of these movements, savvy shoppers are increasingly seeing old clothes as in-the-know collectibles instead of over-and-done outfits from the past. And since the early 2000s were the first time digital photography helped anybody — and everybody — take pictures at a fashion show, there’s more searchable, shareable content for these clothes, which makes them even more in demand once they hit social media.

“Nine out of 10 times, when you see a Sienna Miller picture from the early 2000s, she’s wearing something from Matthew Williamson,” says Irish writer Freya Drohan. “But I was still a school kid when that happened. I couldn’t afford them then. I can now, and the old dresses are seared into my brain!” Today, Drohan finds those boho-flounce gowns on eBay and the RealReal for under $100 and wears them on the New York City gala circuit. “They’re a hit,” she confirms. 

Of course, not all zombie fashion brands can be scored for 90% off. After the buzzy vintage boutique James Veloria hosted a Todd Oldham pop-up shop in their Chinatown HQ in 2021, the brand’s Google searches spiked… and so did prices. Oldham famously shuttered his namesake line in 1999 after a decade of gasp-worthy pieces like mosaic-print trench coats and beaded skirt sets that mimic the pattern of tie-dye.  A year later, Oldham’s runway finds go for $300 to $5,000 on resale sites like eBay and 1st Dibs, where cataloging pieces from the ’90s design phenom alongside antique furniture and Sotheby’s-worthy modern art helps position the clothes as historically significant instead of just old.

That pedigree of “cool girl history” is a driving force behind TikTok’s embrace of vintage fashion hauls, and Gen Z’s hunt-it-down obsession with long lost labels. On a recent Friday morning in Manhattan, 22-year-old interior design intern Jane Lewis scrolled through the RealReal searching for Marc by Marc Jacobs, the LVMH-backed diffusion line that operated from 2001 through 2015 and helped float Jacobs’s quirk-fueled aesthetic from rarified runways into streets and wealthy suburban school hallways. “I still look at old runway photos of that stuff,” said Lewis. “It feels like it’s from another time in New York that I’ll never know.” When Marc by Marc Jacobs first hit the tiny Bleecker Street boutique that became a downtown hangout, Lewis wasn’t born yet. (I’ll give you a minute to recover before continuing your read…) 

Today, the Parsons School of Design senior and her friends often search for the brand’s pieces online. “But we’re most interested in the ones that say ‘Marc Jacobs’ with the ‘Jacobs’ in gray on the label, instead of the ones that say ‘Marc by Marc Jacobs.’” The earliest pieces, says Lewis, are “cooler” than the later items because fewer pieces were produced, and they were done so “with Marc Jacobs himself right there.” Other zombie fashion brands getting scooped up by college kids? “Anything from Sex and the City, because it’s on Netflix right now, so we’re all watching it,” said Chloe Plasse, 19, a student from Los Angeles who recently discovered Tracy Feith’s fluttery bias-cut skirts, thanks to Carrie Bradshaw’s date night looks circa 2001. “And I look for Brock Collection all the time on eBay. I know running a fashion brand is hard, but it’s like why did that have to shut down? It was so cute.’” 

Both Plasse and Morton say they’ve seen friends hunting for old pieces from Topshop Unique, the fast fashion brand of the early aughts that counted Kate Moss, Christopher Kane, and J.W. Anderson as collaborators. “The blazers are still so good!” exclaims Drohan. And though high-quality design is one way to ensure “zombie” brands achieve longevity, the cheaper synthetic materials used by brands like Topshop have actually helped with durability. Polyester, after all, never really fades. 

For designers themselves, the feeling of seeing their old stuff walking through the world anew remains fun but also surreal. “I’m excited to know people still think about them,” says Daryl Kerrigan, the Irish-born, Brooklyn-based designer who created the Daryl K pants that Morton still tries to hunt down on sleepless nights. “Seeing the pants in the wild is always funny, though, because so many people tried to copy what we did. Knowing nothing compares to the original makes me glad I still kept a few of the old pairs. You know, for fashion emergencies.”

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