Menswear Nerds Are Flocking To This Ebay Alternative
Sunny Lam was on the hunt. The thirtysomething clothing designer and consultant in New York wanted—needed—rare pieces from the early 2000s by his cult favorites, Raf Simons and Helmut Lang. “I used to go on EBay, but it’s a bit of a migraine,” Lam says, explaining that the selection is disorganized, the photo quality stinks, and the best pieces sell almost instantly. Then Lam found Grailed, an online menswear resale shop that is to EBay what Saint Laurent Chelsea boots are to Crocs; a “grail” in internet menswear parlance is an article of clothing you’ve been searching for forever. Not long ago on the site, Lam scored a T-shirt from Simons’s summer 1998 Black Palm collection, a seminal look in Lam’s circles. Today, Grailed occupies a spacious top-floor loft in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. On a recent afternoon, Gupta was sitting on a large leather couch in front of a wall of mounted skateboard decks. With him were the company’s director of marketing, Jake Metzger, 30, and brand director, Lawrence Schlossman, 29, who give the site its clean graphic look and frat-light tone; Grailed is as much a fashion magazine as it is a consignment shop. “The site couldn’t look bad if you expect someone to spend $4,000 on a jacket,” says Schlossman, who formerly ran the influential menswear blog Four Pins and is now in charge of Grailed’s social media and its blog, Dry Clean Only. (They each interpreted “fire” in their own way: Gupta had on a red buffalo plaid jacket; Metzger, jeans, a button-up shirt, and a blazer; and Schlossman, all black, including his slide sandals.) Read more at Bloomberg.
