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When I started the “Retail Confessions” column in this newsletter’s early days, I had one question: What happens to all this STUFF? After killing time in Saks in New York City years back, I found imagining a home for all the clothes and bags and shoes on display impossible. So I decided to ask people who had worked the sales floor who buys it all (on a journalist’s income, it certainly wasn’t me). 

That initial story made me realize something that should have been obvious much sooner: Retail salespeople were on the front lines of the fashion industry, yet few journalists, if any, in my position were talking to them. This is likely because this kind of reporting wouldn’t fly in publications like Vogue with major ad accounts and a vested interest in maintaining relationships with brands for that ad money, borrowing clothes for shoots, and fashion show seats. After I published the Saks piece, people who had worked at other luxury stores reached out wanting to chat. One, who worked at Harrods, told me something that unlocked my conception of the column: 

“You know what I realized working there? They live by different rules. Rules don’t apply to people who have money like that, because money gives them a certain kind of freedom and a certain kind of audacity that people who are middle class like you and me wouldn’t be able to fathom.” 

The series became a psychograph of the uber wealthy during a period when this group possesses more cultural and political impact than the rich did in the Gilded Age. They’re dumping half a billion on elections, polluting Vogue and the Met Gala with their tackiness, and living largely without regard for taste or charitable giving. But what are they like in private, when they’re shopping? 

Obviously, the wealthy are not a monolith. Many of the VICs I interview are fashion encyclopedias who buy luxury ready-to-wear to project a certain image at their high-powered jobs and because they love it. But a lot of people buying this stuff have no jobs or particular interest in fashion (meaning, as one stylist told me, they probably have no idea who Matthieu Blazy is). I’ve published 40 “Retail Confessions” in Back Row, and noticed a few themes that have come up again and again. Ahead, what I’ve gleaned from these dozens of interviews.

Men are really not careful when they cheat. I know, I know, this is top of mind the week Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy spilled into the news, along with fresh reports that he may also have had relations with one of his executives (side note: Bloomberg is diabolical for clipping Huang saying in a past interview that his role “shouldn’t be a job that you take for granted”). But just about every person I talked to (except for the good folks at The Row) had stories about cheating spouses who came in with mistresses. One guy who shopped at Louis Vuitton for his wife (and even showed their sales associate photos of their cats) went into that very store with his mistress — then tried to avoid their usual salesperson. Baseball players who patronized a particular Gucci store used to come in during the week with a girlfriend, and then their wives and kids on the weekend. One athlete even hit on a Gucci salesperson aggressively enough that security had to get involved — only for said athlete to come back with his partner and kid and ask the staffer not to say anything. Another buying Chanel came in wearing a wedding ring with two younger girls and requested a private room. 

These men knew their money bought discretion (I only heard of one instance where the salesperson hinted at an affair to the spouse, entirely by accident). As an ex-Prada person told me, “Every time I see them with somebody, it’s always the first time.”

Rich people get away with unhinged behavior. One person recalled a Chanel client, who spent $600,000 a year, “rolling around on the ready-to-wear floor, hammered off Champagne, and just telling my manager to pretty much go fuck herself… she was like, ‘Fuck you, I can do what I want. Don’t tell me to get off the floor.’” A billionaire’s son ended up having sex in a fitting room at Neiman Marcus. One client returned shoes with “literal shit on the bottom” — and Harrods took them back. And yet another client of a luxury department store got to shop in the dark. “We would shut down the entire department for her and turn off all the lights,” recalled one of the store’s former assistants. Why? “She was somebody’s very rich wife and didn’t like light.”

Money can buy you friends — friends who want something from you. Shopping is often a salve for boredom and loneliness, which helps explain the proverbial damage VICs can do at one store or brand. One Bergdorf salesperson told me about clients who spent “around $30,000” each week, and “it was never under $10,000.” Even with greedflation, this is a lot of clothing! Asked why people buy so much, one Neiman Marcus personal shopper, whose clients spent “anywhere from $40,000 a year to upward of a million and a half a year,” said, “Boredom, ego, trying to fill voids.” A Brunello Cucinelli salesperson told me the $11,000 shearling vests would “sell very well” to “just bored people.”

But it’s not just boredom — it’s also loneliness. “A lot of these people, they might not talk to people all day long. This is their weekly pick-me-up,” said a Bergdorf source. The Harrods person said one client asked if they could “just hang out.” And a Barneys person told me, “I’d spend hours talking to these women about their lives and think, Do they have friends?”

Salespeople are their therapists — but the relationship is transactional. At most stores, salespeople try to develop closeness with their clients to boost business. “It felt gross that I had to turn every conversation into a sales pitch,” said the Barneys source, who wondered about their clients’ social lives. A Tiffany source said, “You’re their best friend. You have to know their birthday, their husband’s birthday, their kids’ birthdays, their anniversary, their mom’s birthday.” Successful salespeople mined long appointments for information to close future sales. At Loro Piana, one salesperson studied his clients’ behavior during private shopping sessions: “I cannot tell you how many pieces of a higher price point I sold later because I noticed something that they touched that they would’ve never mentioned — their eye went that way or they pulled up the skirt a little bit.” However, salespeople were the ones who had to be careful about what they said. Bring up politics in the wrong way, said a Neiman Marcus source, and “not only have they lost a friend, they’ve also lost a client.”

This dynamic flips at Hermès, where staff feared their clients only befriended them to get bags. “As a salesperson, you’re the provider. So if you become friends with a client, you have to wonder, are they your friend because you provide bags, or because they actually like you? I have a friend who left, and the clients — because he couldn’t get them bags anymore — just don’t respond now,” said someone who worked at Hermès in Paris.

They like the “game.” Nothing makes you want something like being told you can’t have it.

I suspect people who don’t have to work for a living end up channeling their ambition elsewhere — quite often, the Hermès boutique. “Billionaires could actually go buy the bags without coming into the store, but they like to make a statement that they are capable of buying the bags through the store. They like the game. They don’t like to be played but they like to win something that’s hard to get,” said the Paris source.

But this played out at other stores, too. During Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe golden years, “There were many times when I took huge pre-orders and couldn’t deliver for another six or seven months,” a boutique source told me. But clients “still waited.”

They compete with one another. You have to hand it to the luxury labels — private shopping events are a highly effective way for them to get people to buy, either because they have to wear the brand head-to-toe to attend or because they don’t want to be outspent. At a Tiffany Blue Book event in Miami, “there was this frenzy in the air where people were like, ‘Oh my God, look at what they’re buying. We have to buy something.’ It was a lot of trying to keep up with the Joneses, but when you’re looking at pieces that start at $100,000, it’s crazy,” said one sales associate.

A Chanel salesperson recalled clients who “would go to a wedding and then they would see somebody wearing this dress or this bag. The next day, they would call you: ‘Hey, this friend of mine, she has this dress. How much was it?’” And sometimes, the people clients were competing with were their husbands’ mistresses. Told her husband’s side-piece spent $30,000 at Dolce & Gabbana, one wife replied, “I’ll go tomorrow and spend more.”

Prior to Huang's resignation as CEO of Nvidia, astonishingly convincing photos of him wearing an archival studded Hedi Slimane leather biker jacket circulated on social media. Huang has bragged time and again about hoarding black Tom Ford leather jackets (that, fun fact, his wife acquired for him). So the idea of a more exciting jacket entering the rotation was indeed peculiar. Enough of us were honeypotted by the photos that Vanity Fair got a reporter to look into them and determined they are in fact AI.

This seems like happy news. After starting to pop the AI bubble, it would have been a damn shame for us fashion lovers if he had popped the archival bubble, too.

Interesting reporting from Dazed: the wellness industry is now trying to capitalize on our mass desire for less screen time. This seems like a better mission than, say, selling us supplements that do nothing or might harm us, or promoting utterly ineffective alternative therapies for treating deadly diseases like cancer. 

Popular anti-screen time modalities, to use a Gwynethism, include: the Brick, a device that blocks you from social media; PhoneLess, an app that allows friends to see your screen time; and Steppin', an app that rewards walking with screen time. TikTok is also full of videos of creators sharing their "de-rotting" methods.

As I discussed in Gwyneth: The Biography, the wellness industry profited by turning health into a luxury good. Similarly, these new therapies (which require discipline, free time, and often money) cast offline life as a superior form of existence — the ultimate luxury, and one that's better than having more stuff to show off.

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