LOOSE THREADS
Moda Operandi has some trunk shows up from the recent collections and if you want to experience a new kind of sticker shock, check out Balmain. A silk beaded tiger print coat is going for $56,000 and a “croc-embossed” knee-length coat described as “100% goat leather” is priced at $100,000, making it the highest-priced item in the current trunk shows.
Apparently stars who went to the Vanity Fair Oscar party (Mark Guiducci’s first as head of editorial content) were traumatized by red-carpet lighting that “was just so unforgiving,” a “VF insider” told Hollywood Reporter. Another guest said, “One poor actress looked like a Diane Arbus character. She was on her phone looking at her pictures and shrieking at her publicist. I heard that she went home and cried herself to sleep. Nobody has heard from her since!”
Domino’s sponsored the party and passed out pizza slices in their own individual black boxes that were supposed to look more high-end than a regular pizza box. Here’s Hollywood Reporter again: “It may have been a party for Hollywood’s most glamorous — but some decidedly déclassé food still managed to make an appearance.”
Today’s story is all about big purchases but if you’re more of a micro-luxury, lipstick-once-in-a-while person, The Outset has a new summer gloss line that I tried and have been enjoying and a waterproof blue tote ScarJo presumably uses when she’ not filming The Exorcist.
I hope you already got your Devil Wears Prada 2 ticket and popcorn purse, because the $50 bundle (which does NOT include the popcorn but DOES include a Runway “promotional magazine”) is listed on Fandango as “sold out.”
And now, today’s big story…
How 9 People Afford New Chanel
Last week, “Chanelmania” swept social media as Matthieu Blazy’s first collection for spring 2026 hit stores around the world. It started with editors and stylists — many of whom, several sources told me, get a 30 percent discount — cramming into the Paris boutique to scoop up $10,000 tweed jackets and $11,000 bags and $1,300 pairs of shoes. In the ensuing days, as Chanel locations in other cities put the collection on sales floors, non-industry people lined up outside New York's stores, looking for animal-print flats, non-quilted bags, and the nearly $7,000 jacket from look one. In that brief window, it seemed like everyone was buying Chanel, inviting the question the haul videos inevitably fail to answer: How were all these people affording it? In this economy, no less?
Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber with their new $11,000 new Chanel “It” bags. (Photos: @kyliejenner and @haileybieber)
Hayley Sacks, the personal finance expert and host of the Financial Tea podcast, called the mayhem “economic dysmorphia.” She, like me, was blown away by the blatant displays of consumerism — the normalization of people running out Chanel's door gleefully with multiple shopping bags’ worth of stuff. She attributed it to two things: First, shoppers have acclimated to greedflated prices. “A $1,300 pair of flats no longer makes people blink an eye,” she told me. Second, these purchases give us a way to deny our economic reality. “Why do people like luxury? It makes them look rich. It’s beautiful, but also, part of the allure is it gives you that little rich-girl pep in your step,” she said.
So I set out to talk to as many people as I could about how they afforded Chanel. I heard from someone who makes $2 million a year who found the prices “ludicrous.” I heard from a fashion Substacker who preordered the $11,000 shopper bag — the first bona fide new “It” bag in many years, I’d argue — with affiliate earnings. Another person told me she was still paying off a $3,000 Saint Laurent bag she bought a few years ago. “It’s hard not to be influenced when everyone has a high-end designer bag,” she noted, adding Chanel bag prices were much too high for her. “It’s like, is everyone rich now?”
Ahead, testimonials from actual Chanel buyers, from the nurse living at home and saving up money, to the litigator who earned $12 million last year.
The Twentysomething Nurse Living With His Parents
Income: My income is around $82,000 after taxes. I put all my money into savings, so when I want something I just take the money out. I do that once or twice a year if there’s something I really want. I won’t buy anything else until I save up what I spent. I put around $500 from every paycheck into a 403(b) for retirement.
What he's buying: I can’t really afford the new Chanel, but I need it.
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