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How far would you go for fashion? A street-clogging line for cool sneakers? An early-morning alarm for a sample sale? A Bradshaw-style stash of Jimmy Choos in your oven, which you only use for storage?
For Laura Gallo-Willis, that’s kid stuff. Recently, the real estate entrepreneur hopped on an international flight to Paris for a Chanel blazer that cost more than the plane ticket.
“I don’t feel myself,” Gallo-Willis told The Post, “if I don’t have anything Chanel on.”
Gallo-Willis is a proud fashion hoarder, devoting rooms in her London mansion to her Chanel stash — and spending an estimated $1.1 million on pieces that range from classic black jackets to kooky resin clutches shaped like old-school mix tapes.
She’s part of a growing global club of style junkies who will do anything for a style score, from stalking former Juicy Couture employees online to moving upstate just to make room for 300 Ralph Lauren jackets.
Here’s what some of these fashion hoarders will do to get their frock fix, from chasing a designer sweatsuit across Chicago to filling a bathtub with curtain cleaner to restore a wrecked prom dress. Here’s what some of these fashion hoarders will do to get their frock fix, from chasing a designer sweatsuit across Chicago to filling a bathtub with curtain cleaner to restore a wrecked prom dress.
The Betsey Johnson bestie: Steph Ermer
When Betsey Johnson’s company went bankrupt in 2012, the 69-year-old designer moved from New York to California — and offloaded her piles of designer prom gear at a Hamptons estate sale. That included most of the brand’s samples — outrageous pieces made exclusively for runway shows that never made it to regular stores.
Steph Ermer, a 37-year-old Betsey Johnson obsessive in Florida, knew the mass taffeta purge meant one thing:
Those rare pieces were somewhere out there to buy. Even better, since Johnson once used real people on the catwalk, a few one-off pieces were large enough for Ermer, who’s a size 6 to 8. She sprang into action and immediately began searching for the rogue runway looks — even pulling sleepless all-nighters online just to find one-off outfits.
Ermer’s transformation to “Betsey bestie” began in high school, when she wore a dress from the frothy New York-based designer to a homecoming dance.
But she only began collecting Johnson’s rockabilly riffs on promwear and club gear when she grew up and found most contemporary fashion boring. A 10-buck Depop listing for a stained Betsey Johnson cherry-print dress piqued her interest; she restored the Y2K-era dress with “100 Oxiclean baths,” kickstarting her hobby.
“Now it’s become a second, full-time job for me,” Ermer admits, with two rooms stuffed with her purchases — one at her own house, the other at her parents’.
The high point of Ermer’s collecting so far? Meeting Johnson herself at a recent pop-up for the brand in New York.
“I blacked out, so I don’t really remember what we talked about, but I got to take a picture with her and she couldn’t have been nicer.”
To get Betsey’s best, Ermer scours vintage sites — Depop is her go-to — for special runway looks, and recently spied an unbranded dress that she reckoned was a catwalk piece, priced at $250. (Rarities these days can hit close to $5,000.)
Sure enough, the black floral corseted piece was the same Johnson original that pop princess Olivia Rodrigo had recently worn while out in Manhattan. “The runway samples didn’t have tags, so no one knew what it was,” Ermer said.
“The Betsey team is trying to buy it back from me, but I don’t sell my rare pieces.”
The Juicy Couture junkie: Katerina Kladis
“I am an OG Juicy Girl,” said Katerina Kladis proudly. The 39-year-old personal shopper first eyed her lifelong obsession in an episode of the 2003 reality show, “Newlyweds,” when Jessica Simpson was wearing it while lounging around the house.
Obsessed with the terrycloth hoodies and sweatpants, which came in the same vibrant colors as Starburst candy and often had the word “JUICY” bedazzled across the butt, the Chicago native saved all her money for new scores.
“I wanted to shop every single collection,” says Kladis, who admits she treated Juicy’s crystal-studded boutique on Oak Street like her own teen clubhouse. “I looked forward to picking out the pieces I wanted to buy.”
Almost three decades later, Katerina reckons she’s clocked up a collection of 2,000 pieces from the brand beloved by Paris, Britney and Lindsay at their messiest Perez Hilton peaks.
“It represents more than just tracksuits,” she said. “It captures a very specific moment in fashion and pop culture when luxury, celebrity culture and everyday style collided.” Today, Kladis has a Juicy Couture mannequin from the shuttered store, which she bought when it closed down in 2015. Now she wants to find the pillows, furniture and paintings which decorated those interiors.
Kladis is equally juiced on Juicy’s more bizarre lifestyle items, many of which were only made for celebrities or magazine photo shoots. Trawling Facebook Marketplace, she’s snapped up pink branded cooking utensils, a Sephora-collaboration trunk — a splurge at $350 — and even a tea party set first created for Juicy’s “Alice in Wonderland”-themed ad campaign in 2010.
“That goes for over $1,000,” Kladis told The Post. “Ask anyone what they’re looking for, and they’re looking for that.”
And Kladis’s Juicy Couture obsession recently came full circle, as the label’s current owners asked to rent some of her OG pieces for a social media campaign. She scored $1,000 for the project — about 20% of what she’s spent on actual Juicy Couture items since her teen years.
“Juicy is in my DNA,” she says. “They were thinking of me when they designed these pieces.”
The Ralph Lauren historian: Laird McIntosh
300 tweed jackets. That’s just one category in Laird McIntosh’s personal archive dedicated to all things Ralph Lauren. The fifty-something Broadway vet — he’s played the titular Phantom of the Opera, among other roles — became fascinated with the preppy brand as a kid in Canada, even sweet-talking the manager of the store at his local mall into a part-time job.
“I was 15, and I thought, ‘Life doesn’t get better than this.’”
It did, though.
Laird ended up moving to NYC and fulfilling his lifelong dream of performing. In his downtime, McIntosh pored over vintage Polo magazines and scoured thrift stores and the Internet, especially for pieces from the mid-1980s, or what he considers Polo’s peak time.
“I was taking a magnifying glass out to look at Bruce Weber catalogs, at what necktie they were wearing from 1985 — I was looking for a needle in a haystack.” He would buy anything he loved, regardless of whether it would fit him. “That’s when you know you’re really in trouble: you can’t even wear it.”
Fast-forward to the pandemic, when theaters were mothballed and his wife, the actress Polly Baird, complained about the piles of boxes building up in their closet-sized Manhattan apartment.
Cue a major move: upstate, where McIntosh opened an appointment-only store in Kingston, called Thoroughbred, that’s dedicated to nothing but vintage Ralph.
The vast archive is staggeringly comprehensive, with 750 neckties for sale alone. “It’s not that it would allow me to buy it more, but to share my passion,” he says. His wife knows that he is lying.
The Chanel addict: Laura Gallo-Willis
Growing up in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, Laura Gallo-Willis couldn’t even see designer clothes up close: The country’s brutal dictatorship meant that the closest her stylish mom could get was ordering patterns from overseas, then hiring local seamstresses to copy them.
“She used to quote Coco Chanel to me,” says the 54-year-old entrepreneur: “Wear perfume where you want someone to kiss you,” for example, or “Always take one thing off before you leave the house.”
For Gallo-Willis’s high school graduation, she was given a salmon linen Chanel lookalike with a heart-shaped neckline.
Decades later, after a successful career in property acquisitions and a move from Argentina to England, she could finally access and afford the real thing. Laura says that around 80% of her enormous closet comes from the iconic French label, spanning four main designers: Coco Chanel herself, Karl Lagerfeld, Virginie Viard and Matthew Blazy, who currently helms the line.
The most she’s paid for a single piece:
Around $23,500 for a limited-edition acrylic guitar-shaped bag from 2009.
“I go for the rare pieces, because they have a story — Chanel likes me because I buy with intention; everything has a meaning.”
Gallo-Willis typically shops at tony department store Harrods, where the sales associates set aside key runway pieces that aren’t always available to casual shoppers.
But when she can’t get a must-have piece close to home, she’s willing to log some serious mileage. For one elusive, slouchy tweed jacket from 2021, Gallo-Willis called a network of collectors and personal shoppers that she calls “the CC Spy Collective” to find it.
She found it at the glam French style hub Galleries Lafayette. “They tend to know me there,” said Gallo-Willis modestly. “That was during COVID,” she explained, when stores were held to strict rules around socially distanced shopping — and often only allowed one customer inside a boutique at the time.
Naturally, Gallo-Willis got a fast pass into the store. She booked a last-minute plane ticket, flew from Britain to Paris to pick it up at the boutique, paused for lunch at the Ritz, then flew back that very evening.
Now Gallo-Willis has rooms in her home entirely filled with her Chanel acquisitions — but she won’t stop chasing the Double C high. Recently, she bought a notoriously hard-to-get pair of jeans by current designer Matthieu Blazy that were seen on Nicole Kidman.
“Chanel likes me,” Gallo-Willis. “They told me this! Because I buy with intention. Everything has a meaning to me.”
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