On Tuesday afternoon, a line snaked down Prince Street and along Mercer, where Jenna Lyons, former J. Crew president and current star of The Real Housewives of New York, was hawking some of her old clothes and shoes. People shvitzed in the hot sun, telling each other “beauty is pain” to power through for discounted Dries Van Noten. Lyons announced the “stoop sale” on Instagram last week, and in the ensuing frenzy updated the terms to include a $15 cover charge “to be credited toward purchase” and extended hours. (Fifty percent would be going to Planned Parenthood.) When the day of the sale arrived, hours before it was set to begin, the line quickly formed, full of eager (and seemingly flexibly employed) hopefuls looking to snag one of Lyons’s hand-me-downs, which included a pink skirt she wore to the Met Gala and an $850 shearling Prada coat. They also had to sign releases as RHONY cameras were filming inside.
At first, a celebrity stoop sale seemed novel enough. In April of 2022, Martha Stewart opened her Bedford estate to the Martha-loving public, hosting, and filming, a tag sale where she charged attendees $1,000 for upholstered headboards and the privilege of rummaging through her stuff. Last May, Chloë Sevigny hosted a star-studded sale in Noho, where buyers left with selfies and the actor–“It” girl’s cast-off Versace micro skirts. The New York Times and Vogue were on hand to take scene reports. (“There’s a lot of stuff I don’t want to wear anymore,” Sevigny told the Times. “This is a big purge to pay for a few years of storage, give a chunk to a charity and pay for some more storage.”) Soon after, Kim Gordon was selling her ankle boots in Silver Lake, Stacy London had a mink for sale in Brooklyn, and Jemima Kirke took $70 on Venmo for T-shirts. And it didn’t just stop at clothing: Spike Lee and John Wilson also held garage-style sales too last year, where they sold everything from merch to rugs. Chloe Fineman of Saturday Night Live is hosting her second “summer boudoir” sale next month. Enough. This is what Housing Works is for!
In December, celebrity stoop sales made New York’s annual list of reasons to love living here, but only six months later, I am issuing an official retraction. Maybe it’s because there’s something semi-fraudulent about this kind of sale when the seller very likely did not pay for the goods in the first place. The faux folksiness of the sales’ marketing is irritating for the same reason: Lyons held up a homemade sign that belied the $6 million “stoop” on which the sale was occurring. The prices were accordingly in the three-digit range, mostly, which, again, kind of takes the “stoop” out of stoop sale. It’s also just … unbecoming for a certain style of famous person to trade on their fame in this way — the event-ized celebrity stoop sale sits somewhere at the indecency nexus of hawking Cameos or crypto.
If the celebrity stoop sale is to occur at all, it must occur on the actual stoop of the actual celebrity. It should follow the normal rules of stoop sale–ing, which is to put a sign out in the neighborhood — not on Instagram! — alerting locals to the address and time. The fact that you are, say, Naomi Watts should be incidental. Let that be the luck of the yard-sale shopper to discover on their own when they say to their friend, three blocks later, “Didn’t that woman I bought this $3 vase from look a lot like Naomi Watts?” Everything should be priced to move: a $15 Prada shearling coat. A $1 Gucci belt. $5 for an old set of Beats headphones from an Oscars swag bag that is on a lawn blanket next to a free pile of toddler summer clothes and a fondue pot.
Lyons’s event seems to have been a success, in so much as she mostly sold out of her old stuff and banked a RHONY story line. (I hope as a viewer that there was at least one catfight among the racks.) But if a sale is indeed meant to be an archival fashion event for charity, let it continue to be so! But let’s call it an archive sale, or a fashion fundraiser, or a luxury resale. Here is a proposed rule of thumb: If the sale took place somewhere with a door, it wasn’t a stoop sale. Leave the stoop out of it.