On a cloudy Wednesday, I strode into luxury vintage retailer What Goes Around Comes Around’s Jersey City, warehouse-like offices to meet Julian Guevara, VP of retail and client services. His appearance is casual at first glance, but upon deeper research, not an item was left to chance. Guevara wears Issey Miyake grey knit pants, a long sleeve Spike Lee T-shirt, a vintage Rolex (from his birth year), and Air Force 1’s. Though I’m initially intrigued by his ensemble, my eyes can’t help but wander towards the racks of ostentatious clothing that line the vast open space.
The ready-to-wear is separated by section. First comes a rack of T-shirts, but these are no ordinary T-shirts. The entry point for a real vintage graphic tee starts around $100. If it’s emblematic of a concert or rock band, that number automatically jumps to $300. The next is a rack full of jackets. Think: a vintage Alaia strung with leather fringe, tweedy Chanel blazers, and a red Louis Vuitton letterman that would make any fashion girl swoon.
After items are authenticated, quality-controlled, photographed, and given a SKU either at this location or the company's Japan offices, they come to this floor, where Guevara and his team start the allocation process. They’re not only discerning which store to send each piece, but ensuring each item is as special as it is pristine.
We move onto dresses. I’m momentarily distracted by a Jean Paul Gaultier mesh sheath with a trompe l’oeil motif down its front—items of this make and model are highly desirable right now. Guevara is on a mission though, pulling Emilio Pucci dresses circa the 2010s with original tags from the rack because they aren’t “special enough.” A Gucci dress has a few minor pulls that made it past the first round of quality control, but are not up to his muster either. Of course, hidden in the back is a rack for a few items Guevara has snuck off the curation for his own personal indulgence—perks of the job.
Once we’re done leafing through the racks, it’s time for a meeting with the head of authentication (who remains anonymous in this story at the company's request) in Guevara’s office, which is sparsely decorated to better emphasize the framed Hermès scarf on the wall. She’s currently putting together training for all employees to help them better recognize counterfeits—they’ve gotten really, really good. She’s scored a few helpful details through sources ranging from Reddit threads to PurseForum. She pulls up an extremely zoomed-in image of Chanel’s interlocking "CC" logo on an interior metal plate. Her research revealed that counterfeits actually created a more perfect-looking logo than the real thing. The originals all had a slight dip in the same place.
It used to be that you could only tell a fake Chanel by its hardware and serial number. Now, they are literally microchipped, but somehow fakes still pervade almost everywhere. “As an individual consumer, you can’t risk it,” says Guevera, of the reason shoppers should always allow experts to confirm authenticity.
Next up is a meeting with marketing manager Barbara Beach—she came to What Goes Around Comes Around after working under costume designer Pat Fields in the early days of her career. The two of them are conceptualizing an upcoming photo shoot, drawing inspiration from old pin-up postcards. (You’re shooting only vintage items, so why not lean into the vintage theme?) Immediately, Guevara starts racking his brain for items in stock to include in the shoot—perhaps a black-and-white Chanel swimsuit?
Julian Guevara, VP of retail and client services, examining a vintage jacket at the WGACA Jersey City headquarters.
Photo: Courtesy of What Goes Around Comes Around
Guevara discussing options for a photo shoot with marketing manager Barbara Beach.
Photo: Courtesy of What Goes Around Comes Around
Then it’s on to approving layouts for newsletters. Deciding between which grouping of black Chanel classic flaps to capture seems eerily similar to the cerulean belt dilemma in The Devil Wears Prada—apparently a handbag can, in fact, look fat in an image. To center the button on the page or not? What about a rectangular button? Once those questions are addressed, we’re off to another part of the building, noting pieces in stock that could work for the aforementioned shoot. Odds are, there’s only one of each of the rarer items so they better act fast before it sells.
We enter one storage room with shelves upon shelves of Louis Vuitton bags. This is the photo studio where the team shoots product flats for the e-commerce site. The actual photography setup appears intricate, but I’m distracted by the sea of LV monograms surrounding me.
Once Guevara has flagged enough pieces for the shoot, he has to shift from creative manager to a more logistical one. He hops on a quick touch base call for an upcoming event with Threads—just fun stuff like liability contracts. A quick NDA-covered meeting (which I’m not allowed in), and it’s time to leave for theretail store. Most afternoons, the multi-hyphenate manager hops in his car and heads through the tunnel into the city at least once to the What Goes Around Comes Around SoHo location. Sometimes he’s bringing inventory over or simply coming to connect with stylists and managers. On the way over, we chat about Guevara's career. Guevara never went to college, gleaning his experience instead from early styling jobs then a long stint at Intermix before he came to WGACA in 2016.
As we approach West Broadway, we walk through the front doors of a space that feels more like a parlor than a store—though it’s lined with color coordinated racks of Vivienne Westwood corsets and Miu Miu minis and glass encasements of Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton handbags. While I distract myself with price tags that have my bank account cowering (Ambria Mische, What Goes Around Comes Around senior vice president, likened investing in an Hermès Birkin bag to purchasing a car), Guevara chats with Jordan Wilson, VIP client manager.
Today, Wilson is prepping for a celebrity stylist to stop by for a pull. This means said stylist will select options for a client to potentially wear to an event. Wilson says these vary in nature greatly. Sometimes his help is needed to essentially curate a roster of potential items. Other times, the celebrity stylist knows exactly what he or she wants, and Wilson is essentially just there to take stock of what they are pulling. Now that it’s about as common to see stars like Bella Hadid and Dua Lipa in a vintage piece as it is a runway look, these sorts of operations are frequent. Vintage resources like WGACA also offer stylists and shoppers an avenue to capitalize on nostalgic trends without waiting for runway pieces to hit the floor. And vintage dealers can react quickly to those social media-induced explosions. For example, “We always had Mugler,” says Guevara. “Now, we've just doubled our buy.” Recent clients of the brand include Rihanna and Bretman Rock—though many more prefer not to publicize their source.
In fact, many top clients rarely set foot in the store. “Some of them we’ve never met,” says Wilson. Instead stylists, whether that be their personal stylists or the WGACA stylists, do the work for them. And a great deal of that is with high-budget clients, celebrity or not. When I asked about the craziest stories, they recounted opening the store for Drake in the middle of the night. The item he selected was, of course, needed that day in Toronto. So Guevara hopped on a plane to deliver that item to Canada that morning.
It’s also not uncommon for fashion brands and designers to shop in-store. A brand like Gucci might send representatives to fill in their own archives. Others might be hunting for inspiration and buy accordingly. And when Jean Paul Gaultier walks in, “everyone’s obviously freaking out, but we played it cool,” Wilson assures me. The clientele is “literally anyone you can think of,” he continues. Not just fashion people, but film executives, musicians, artists. Apparently, Florence Welch is always looking for 1920s and ‘30s floral dresses.
Inside the What Goes Around Comes Around store's main salon at 351 West Broadway in New York City.
Photo: Courtesy of What Goes Around Comes Around
Though direct missions may vary, all guests are hopefully there to celebrate their love of vintage fashion. It’s not uncommon for an in-house stylist to hit it off with a particularly sartorially-minded client, pop a bottle of champagne, and offer them a chance to mosey down to the vault—a space normally reserved for VIP clientele only. Naturally, I was intrigued, so I decided to take a peek.
We descend a back stairwell into a basement-like room bordered in more clothing and accessories. Here, Wilson is putting together a pull-to-purchase for a West Coast client (a rare and dying favor). He assembles a rack of clothes he thinks she might like, then will later box it up and send it her way. She will keep and purchase the items she wants, then ship back the rejects, which will go back on the floor. (You have to spend a great deal of money for this sort of transaction.)
Wilson himself is clad in a floral-print Gucci blouse from a 2013 runway collection, vintage military pants, and zebra print Manolo Blahnik oxfords. In fact, all of the salespeople on the floor are donning envious looks. All of which are, of course, vintage because that’s what all the fashion-obsessed employees are interested in.
“Growing up, I was always into vintage clothing and shopped at vintage and thrift stores before I started working for luxury clothing retailers,” says Guevara. After years working and learning in the primary market, he noticed "that the collections designers were putting out each season felt less special, identical to past seasons or other brands, and poorly made for the prices the brands were charging." He continues, “The over-saturation of certain brands in countless stores across the country and online made clients have no urgency to purchase.”
Now, Guevara and Wilson agree that one of the most rewarding aspects of working at What Goes Around Comes Around is to convert a current luxury shopper to the vintage world where they’ll find that designer fashion infused with an extra dose of sustainability, affordability (sometimes), and individuality. These vintage fashion-obsessed employees get out of the job what they put into it; just look at their ensembles. After all, what goes around really does come around.