The Rise of the Super Shopper: Luxury has Never been So Competitive

Resale alerts. Proxy services. Secret WhatsApps. This is what it takes to buy the best—and most coveted—clothes.

The White Stripes’ anthem “Seven Nation Army” never fails to have a Proustian effect on Bianca Jebbia. Every time she hears it, Jebbia flashes back to the first time she walked into the Marni boutique on Mercer Street in New York. More than two decades later, she recalls entering a futuristic gallery of fashion, with clothes suspended from chrome rails as seriously as fine art, and Jack White screeching on the stereo—as he was in most places circa 2003—and being struck by an immediate, almost cosmic certainty: “This is what I want to be when I grow up.”

By this she means not just a woman who wears Marni but an actual item from the Marni Spring 2003 collection. For Jebbia, this was love at first sight. But alas, it was unrequited. At the time, she was a 20-something salesperson. She sold designer retail; she didn’t shop it.

Today, Jebbia is a Chanel-collecting fixture in the front rows of Schiaparelli, Chloé, and Junya Watanabe with the resources—and the drive—to hunt down treasures from fashion’s past and present. She reminisces about “the ones that got away” as wistfully as one might recall a formative lover. It’s not just Marni; Jebbia has “a guy” who sources her spiky-kneed leather pants from Undercover. On 1stDibs, she tracked down Chanel lederhosen from the 2014 Métiers d’Art collection—because, she says, “Why not sit around having coffee at home in lederhosen?”

Call her a supershopper: a new, ultradetermined breed for whom tracking down items new and old has become something more obsessive than a mere pastime. It’s more like an Olympic sport—and the more elaborate, time-consuming, and überniche the chase, the better. Is the item in question sold out? Supershoppers don’t take no for an answer. Is there only one left on the planet and it’s locked in a Siberian warehouse guarded by rabid dogs? Supershoppers play the long game. After all, nothing ever became a holy grail by being easy to get.

In this world, there are no mere shopping transactions where you walk into a store and plunk down a credit card. Where’s the fun in that? These are retail quests full of twists and turns, hidden passageways, and secret handshakes. There are reverse Google image searches using highly specialized search terms, eBay notifications, watch lists on the RealReal, Meta resale groups, and auction houses. WhatsApp messages are swapped at all hours of the day and night with luxury retail sales associates (“SAs” to those in the know).

You might be a supershopper if you find that intel gleaned from the chat of a favorite shopping newsletter has led you to a website you’ve never heard of and that—even after you investigate—you only vaguely comprehend. (Take, for instance, buyee.jp, a “proxy service for Japanese bargains.”) Nevertheless, you boldly enter your credit-card number and press “buy now.” After all, you’re thisclose. What are you going to do—stop there?

Another sign? When you find yourself regaling your friends with rich stories of your latest conquests—the retelling itself being a new badge of honor. In supershopper culture, it’s not just about how you look in these garments, it’s what it took to get them.

People are always asking me, ‘Oh my God, how do you find this stuff?’” says fashion writer Emilia Petrarca, creator of the popular newsletter Shop Rat. “My answer is always the same, which is that you have to be insane. I’m up early, I’m there first, and that’s how I get all my stuff—because I’m completely nuts.”

When we speak, first thing on a weekday morning, Petrarca is only partially caffeinated, yet she has already scoured every shopping link in her inbox and Googled the price of tariffs on a green knitted poncho by a brand called Cecilie Telle that she was thinking of having shipped over from London.

Time and space are no obstacles for a true supershopper. Photographer Tommy Ton recalls visiting family in Bakersfield, California, when he learned that Balenciaga was holding an exclusive sale of Nicolas Ghesquière–era treasures back in New York. He dropped everything, jumped on a two-hour bus to a red-eye flight, landed at 7 a.m., and by 10:30 had snagged three pairs of Fall 2010 Bakelite heels. Ton completed the whole journey in reverse and got home a day later—footwear in tow. “My family was in complete shock,” he says.

Professional fashion sourcer Gab Waller enjoys the hunt itself as much as (or more than) the item it yields. The L.A.-based Aussie made a name for herself among clients like Marianna Hewitt and Sofia Richie Grainge for her almost magical ability to unearth items that no one else can, like the Chanel 25 bag or the new Celine belt with the oversize buckle. “I feel most rewarded when I find the item, as opposed to when the client buys it,” Waller says.

What feels new, Waller says, is that, thanks in part to ever-advancing shopping technology, it’s not just insiders who will go the extra mile. More and more, “regular people” are not only sick of wearing the same thing as everyone else, they’re also, she says—perhaps ironically—turned off by the wild overconsumption so often celebrated on social media. Devoting serious time and effort to finding a single coveted item is consumerism, to be sure, but it’s also restrained and highly specific—the opposite of the “haul” mentality.

Rachel Tashjian, CNN’s senior style reporter and a paragon of deep-dive shopping, sees another potential virtue in the approach. Is it healthy for shopping to take over your life? No, she says. Go read a book. But can these extreme shopping habits reflect a new kind of consumerism that is aspirational in its own way—maybe even vaguely ethical, for prizing off-the-beaten-path sources and “if you know, you know” uniqueness?

Per Tashjian, as millennials moved away from the pale-pink sameness that defined their generation’s early aesthetic, they developed in its place a new culture of seeking. Obsessively digging to find that perfect item for one’s home or wardrobe, one that feels unique and individual, could be considered an act of self-expression, a way to differentiate, to refine how we want to be perceived.

“These days, you don’t want the cashmere sweater that everyone has. You want the really strange, special cashmere sweater,” Tashjian says with a laugh. “The one you happened to discover driving down the road in Scotland and bought from an old woman in a hut.”

You could read this as a rejection of the kind of low-effort, algorithmically driven shopping—that frictionless scroll, click, buy, repeat—that we all fall into from time to time. Supershopping is an intentional and time-consuming process of curation in which the friction (by contemporary standards, the annoyance) of having to work to get something is at least part of the appeal. It’s the antithesis of double-clicking to buy whatever new thing Instagram said you needed.

As for Bianca Jebbia, she doesn’t call sales associates SAs, perhaps because she used to be one of them. She refers to them as “my people.” They are guests at her dinners and birthday parties. She prizes these relationships, not least because they are the sole conduit to the many “extras” rarely seen outside of runways and photo shoots. Take the four pairs of tartan tights she picked up from Daniel Lee’s debut collection for Burberry. “Those weren’t Wolford. They aren’t Falke,” she says. They can only come straight from the house. For Jebbia, a fashion completist, these details are an essential part of nailing the look.

In November, a friend of Graves posted a photo from Preclothed, the vintage shop in Paris’s sixth arrondissement where the owner told her Mary-Kate Olsen sourced the delicate vintage hair combs used to style the Row’s Summer 2026 lookbook. The photo showed Olsen’s reject pile, plus a few of the combs she’d actually used in the show. Graves, who is getting married this summer, asked her friend to return to the store and ended up buying three combs for her rehearsal dinner. “I would never have been able to do that,” she says, “were it not for the extraordinary abundance and connection of the internet.”