The New Elite Way to Shop Is Off the Grid and Invite Only
Stylist Lizzie Wheeler’s Instagram Close Friends story isn’t filled with emotional oversharing or long-winded rants about her annoying coworkers like any other millennial’s might be. Instead, it’s stocked with vintage Prada skirts, sample-sale Pucci tops, and pink Hermès Constance bags—each one up for grabs, if you’re fast enough. Blink and you’ll miss it: A blurry shot of ’90s kitten heels captioned “DM to claim” can vanish in minutes, claimed by someone quicker, savvier, more tapped in. This isn’t just shopping; it’s an exclusive backstage pass to someone else’s closet.
In 2025, the rules of secondhand luxury have been rewritten. Stylists, editors, and influencers are ditching third-party apps and selling directly to their followers. In a sea of ShopMy links, the shift to secondhand, personal selling is reflective of what we’re aspiring for as a society post–peak content creator saturation: trust, curation, and, most of all, exclusivity.
Over the last few years, personalized peer-to-peer shopping platforms have upended the norms around secondhand shopping. Welcome to the golden age of the internet, where with a single click on someone’s social media bio, you can access their closet. For content creators, the appeal is obvious. Pickle—a clothing marketplace—has quickly become the app du jour for influencers looking to offload their wardrobes. Since its launch in 2021, Pickle has tripled its net users year over year, fueled by a growing obsession with creator-driven commerce.
At the center of this shift are Pickle’s creator closets, curated by influencers whose personal style and online personas feel aspirational—but also accessible. They’re often front and center at every function, dressed in an outfit you’ll either see on their ShopMy or dissected later on r/NYCInfluencerSnark. Their followers are watching closely and, more importantly, renting the exact outfit that went viral on social media weeks prior.
“Within creators’ own closets and with their social posts, they’re really showcasing how they styled a piece or an outfit, and that makes our customers really excited about that item,” Pickle cofounder Julia O’Mara explained. She nods to several big-name creators with closets on the platform, most of whom have spoken publicly about how in-tune they are with their audience and what they’re buying, wearing, and saving. “They’re having this constant interaction with their audience, where people are DMing them and saying, ‘Hey, I love this outfit so much. Can you please add it to your Pickle closet?'” It also doesn’t hurt that renting and selling their clothing to dozens of loyal followers is a lucrative side hustle, O’Mara admits. According to Pickle, the app’s top lenders can make upward of $3000 a month by loaning pieces from their wardrobe on the platform.
This is parasocial shopping in action: a blend of fandom, fashion, and perceived intimacy that blurs the lines between influence and transaction. It’s not just about liking someone’s outfit; it’s about feeling like you know them. Owning a sliver of their wardrobe—even if it’s just renting that one vintage Fendi baguette bag for your college friend’s wedding—might bring you one step closer to their lifestyle.
What’s better than going straight to the source, though? In recent years, celebrity and influencer closet sales feel like a weekly occurrence in New York, each once promising a world of archival gems and hard-to-find runway pieces that only the coolest It girls in Manhattan would wear. Chloë Sevigny, Jenna Lyons, and Paloma Elsesser have all taken part. “When creators post about closet sales, in-person or not, things are much more fairly priced in a way that resale platforms and consignment stores are not,” admitted one anonymous fashion writer who supplements her income with closet sales on her Instagram story. “There’s also the fact that not only are you buying a piece from someone you really admire, but you’re having a direct conversation with them,” she explained.
The writer, who works for a major women’s fashion publication, keeps her side gig quiet—low-key and mostly invisible. If you aren’t tapped in to her Instagram, chances are you’ll miss that runway Prada skirt from ’97 she sold for less than a quarter of what it’s going for on Depop (a platform she jokes is “cooked” given outrageous price gouging from full-time resellers).”
“As someone with the following, I know that if I want to go to dinner this week, I can post something from my closet that’s well-priced and have $300 in my pocket in a matter of hours,” she says. Once, during a casual walk from her Lower East Side apartment to Fanelli Cafe, she managed to sell multiple pieces in just 20 minutes—enough to cover a round of drinks at the SoHo watering hole.
Scoring designer pieces in under-the-radar corners of the internet is already a challenge, but throw invite-only platforms into the mix, and peer-to-peer secondhand shopping starts to feel like an elite sport. Enter Lizzie Wheeler, stylist and resale sleuth behind the Instagram account @shit.u.should.buy. For over three years, Wheeler has made it her mission to unearth the best vintage and secondhand designer finds from consignment sites like The RealReal, posting them on her Instagram Stories like daily fashion dispatches.
Wheeler calls it “strategic shopping,” a fitting term for her thrifty, label-savvy audience who know the thrill of nabbing a deal before it disappears. The real gems live behind a $7-a-month paywall, though. Subscribers to her Substack get access to her Instagram Close Friends story, a tightly curated stream of fashion oddities, cult pieces, and deeply discounted luxury she sells from her own closet or from the closets of people who’ve paid her to offload their pieces. Unlike other consignment platforms, it doesn’t take weeks to get paid out. Wheeler says the majority of her clients (who often sell anonymously due to privacy concerns) get their payments almost immediately after an item sells, barring the commission Wheeler gets in exchange. “There’s lots of people who are just like, ‘Can you slip this into a closet sale somewhere? I want to get rid of it and make a couple hundred bucks today,” Wheeler says.
Here are the rules: Paid subscribers get first dibs on Wheeler’s elusive, private closet sales. Items that don’t get sold within an hour end up on her main story, but usually, they don’t make it that far, with the best deals being snatched up in minutes. Archive Pucci skirts are posted for what feels like pennies and vintage blouses fly within minutes. (Wheeler recounts a recent Chanel tank that was priced to sell at just $95.) Bags are the first to sell since sizing isn’t an issue. “The strangest things will get feverish traction,” she admits, noting how multiple buyers often race to claim the same item in real time, like it’s a virtual sample sale with no line and no mercy.
Approximately 100 people make up Wheeler’s Close Friends list. When I ask if her customer falls into one demographic, she admits there’s no clear formula behind her small but fiercely engaged audience. “It’s not necessarily that my Close Friends on Instagram are the most fashion-insidery people,” she admits. “It’s just girls trying to get a juicy deal.” Still, for many of them, following Wheeler isn’t just about admiring her taste—it’s about sharpening their own. She suspects it’s the illusion of cool that keeps people coming back for more: “These are elite items that came from an elite situation, and therefore, people think it should leverage them up visually.”
Whether it’s a green bubble on Close Friends or a paywalled Substack, the rise of parasocial, secondhand shopping has made exclusivity the ultimate currency. These aren’t mass-market drops—they’re flash moments of access, intimacy, and insider knowledge. “Psychologically, whenever I post that I’m doing a sale and that Substack subscribers get first dibs on Close Friends, I always have people DMing me, trying to convince me to put them on it,” Wheeler jokes. The answer is often a resounding no. It’s 2025, and she has to make bank somehow.
While Wheeler’s closet sales play out publicly (albeit behind a green circle), the more covert side of this resale economy belongs to junior editors and stylists—many of whom quietly told me that selling their own wardrobes is, at times, the only way they can afford to stay in the industry. One editor at a major lifestyle and culture publication admitted to regularly offloading PR gifting—some items brand-new with tags, others gently worn—through her Instagram Close Friends. Her routine was almost formulaic: haul-style try-ons during lunch breaks followed by a story sale that could net her anywhere from $400 to $700 a week. Sometimes a single flip—like a pair of designer-collab sneakers or a gifted Dyson Airwrap—earned her more than her actual paycheck. “My closet sales were the only thing that allowed me to pay rent, clock the hours at my job, and sustain myself in New York,” she says.
In an industry that leans heavily on young, eager, and often grossly underpaid talent, private resale networks have quietly become a financial lifeline. For the lucky followers in the loop, scoring the right deal often comes down to knowing the right person at the right time.
Nowadays, secondhand luxury isn’t just about the item anymore but rather who you buy it from and how you acquire it. Personalized shopping curation is on the rise: Dedicated shopping newsletters, if-you-know-you-know Instagram broadcast channels, and private finsta-style archive accounts dedicated to selling off old luxury purchases are rising in the ranks as the premiere ways to score a vintage deal. What began as a movement toward sustainability has morphed into something much more layered—and far more exclusive.
At the heart of it is a simple truth: Secondhand is no longer the scrappy alternative to retail—it’s a power play. Whether it’s on Pickle, behind a Substack paywall, or via a Close Friends sale that disappears in 24 hours, the best deals come down to trust, connections, and a bit of insider luck. The next wave of secondhand shopping isn’t about endless scrolling—it’s about sliding into your favorite stylist’s DMs and hoping for that coveted Close Friends invite.
(Image credit: Future)
