Inside the buzzy closet sale for L.A. fashion ‘it' girls
This was the notion that two friends, Quinn Shephard and Francesca Goncalves, were discussing in a sun-kissed setting (a 'pool somewhere,' Shephard recalls). They wanted to barter their old clothing, but that was a sticky prospect in Los Angeles — the scene is riddled with suspicious stares from thrift store employees and digital cold wars with teenagers on Depop. There's pomp and circumstance at every turn.
'So many people are like: I go to Wasteland or Crossroads and I get $3,' Shephard explains. 'They're not nice to me.'
Shephard and Goncalves wanted to start a closet sale that felt more like a fun hangout with friends. So one day last summer, Shephard and Goncalves hit the streets of Silver Lake, asking small businesses if they'd host an event that they were calling Outfit Repeater L.A. Shephard jokes that Goncalves is the 'mayor of Silver Lake' — the kind of Gatsby-like woman who makes Los Angeles feel like a small town, chatting with strangers with an endearing openness. Finally, they arrived at Constellation Coffee, a contemporary, sleek coffee shop. To their surprise, the manager agreed to host Outfit Repeater L.A. that upcoming Sunday.
'She's used to indie filmmaking, where you have to go up and ask people for things, and there's power in that,' Goncalves says of Shephard, the director of TV shows including the Hulu drama 'Under the Bridge.' Goncalves works in Stanford Medicine's genetics department.
With their event fast approaching, Shephard and Goncalves created a blitzkrieg of advertisements across social media and posted fliers on lampposts throughout the neighborhood to drum up excitement. 'We literally put up fliers until 2 am. It's so funny because Quinn doesn't do anything unless it's 100%, and I'm like that too,' says Goncalves.
The first Outfit Repeater L.A. event was a success, drawing a crowd of fashion enthusiasts and women who wanted to sell their beloved wardrobes directly to buyers, bypassing the intermediary of a thrift store. Women attendees eagerly inquired about selling their own clothes at the next event, offering up locations and contacts. 'New coffee shops wanted to host us, and new girls wanted to sell,' Goncalves says. 'It snowballed into this thing where it's just getting bigger and bigger, completely by accident.'
Since then, Outfit Repeater L.A. has garnered a reputation as the Eastside's hippest trading post for 'it' girls, creatives and fashion trendsetters. Sellers have included independent film darlings like Geraldine Viswanathan and Francesca Reale, as well as fashion influencers with enviable style, such as Macy Eleni.
Despite its newfound fame, at its core, the closet sale is inclusive and accessible to people of all income levels. 'I wanted to keep it very accessible. I charge a seller fee that's so low, just to cover expenses. It's not just vintage resellers or influencers that can afford to sell,' says Goncalves.
Goncalves attributes the success of the event to a hunger for social events that offer an alternative to the monotony of bar hangs. 'People are tired of the bar scene,' she says.
Shephard explains that the appeal is simple: 'It's like going to a party with your friends for the day, plus you make money.'
At a recent Outfit Repeater L.A. event at Lamill Coffee in Silver Lake, actor Kate Mansi was selling her wardrobe after discovering the event through a friend's recommendation. 'I'm always selling stuff on Instagram,' Mansi says. 'It's nice to do it face to face. Clothes have a story. It's nice to hear the story of the piece you're inheriting.'
Mansi adds, 'I have a very Virgo system with my closet where I turn the hanger backwards if it's something I haven't worn, and if in a year, I still haven't worn it, it must go.' On this Sunday, one of those items was a well-loved blue polka-dot romper with puff sleeves, which Mansi found at a vintage store years earlier, and she sold it for $20. Another was an All Saints trenchcoat, priced at $40, and a gray A.L.C. blouse, for $30. A classic denim Levi's jacket found a new home for $30.
Mansi parted ways with a black dress by Jonathan Simkhai, one of her favorite designers. To the woman who bought it, Mansi wisely prescribed that she wear the dress casually with flats or boots.
At a time when fashion retail has shifted online due to the pandemic, an in-person thrifting event has been warmly received by the community. 'I'm focused on each sale being a unique thing that people walk away from, having gotten a cool piece and making a few new friends and maybe a lover or boyfriend,' says Goncalves.
Alena Nemitz, who has been creating social media content for Outfit Repeater L.A., met her partner of five months at one of the events. 'I was selling, and they were walking through and introduced themselves to me,' she says. 'Now we're dating, which is so cute.'
Eleni, who wrote a book on thrifting called 'Second Chances,' was one of Outfit Repeater's earliest sellers and champions. Growing up with a single mother in Dayton, Ohio, Eleni explains that she was bullied for thrifting during her childhood and is overjoyed to see a new generation embrace it. She believes some of the newfound eagerness for thrifting comes from an increased awareness of the devastating impact of fast fashion. 'When I was a teenager, I wasn't seeing videos on my phone of the inside of a Shein factory,' she says. 'The curtains have been lifted, and there's no way to claim ignorance as to where things are coming from anymore.'
Outfit Repeater L.A. has built a community of shoppers excited about clothing, Eleni explains. 'Everyone is gassing each other up about how fabulous they look,' she says. 'I love seeing people's faces light up over other people's things that they're ready to be done with. It's less [about] people trying to flip a profit and more people just trying to swap their clothes, share their clothes with each other.'
Goncalves describes the endearing experience of spotting items she sold from her closet on other women around Silver Lake. The world suddenly feels smaller and warmer. 'I think clothes are so personal, but they are fleeting in a way,' she says. You love something and you want to pass it on, but it's still your life and your ecosystem, even if it's not right for you anymore.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
5 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Lakers T-shirts and opera on the lake in a small town in Austria
BREGENZ, Austria — It's Dodgers caps, L.A.-themed T-shirts and Lakers shorts on the shores of Lake Constance. What makes Los Angeles especially cool to Bregenz teens as they cruise the third-largest freshwater lake in Europe, I can't say. But one ardent 20-something salesperson told me that he found Austria to be too confining and tradition-bound, whereas he believed that there was opportunity for all in L.A. Bregenz, however, has ambitions of its own that L.A. only dreams of. This town with a population the size of Beverly Hills, and a fraction of Beverly Hills' wealth, produces a monthlong major arts festival that boasts a budget of $31 million and draws more than 250,000 visitors in July and August. The excellent Vienna Symphony is the resident orchestra. Along with conventional symphony and chamber music concerts, a bit of dance and theater is thrown in. The festival further hosts multimedia projects, lakeside tango, children's programs and other miscellany events. But opera is the main draw. A neglected major opera is revived each summer in the handsome, acoustically vibrant Festspielhaus Bregenz. This year it is a brilliant production of George Enescu's epic 'Oedipe.' The impossibly big draw, though, and the one that attracts four-fifths of the festival's audience, is an opera on the Seebühne. This gigantic stage is built directly on the lake and intended for spectacular sets. Bleachers accommodate an audience of 7,000. This year's 'Die Freischütz,' Carl Maria von Weber's early 19th century opera about a huntsman who makes a very bad deal with the devil for a magic bullet, opened last week and runs through Aug. 17. All 27 performances are expected to sell out as usual for the kind of spectacle that exists nowhere else. A fanciful set of creepy, gothic wonder provides real estate for the dead to rise from their graves, for circusy aerial special effects, for intrepid singers to cavort in and out of the water, for nymphets in bespangled bathing suits to splash about, for a fire-breathing dragon to act Godzilla-like and for a light show to be projected on an enormous moon. Las Vegas, eat your heart out. Austrian director Philipp Stölzl's flamboyant production may not take Weber's opera altogether seriously, but Austrians take going to the opera very seriously. The opera is performed without intermission. There is no picnicking or refreshments. The show, a bit over two hours, starts at sunset, which is 9:15 p.m. in July. It may be later if it rains, and it often does. No umbrellas. If necessary, the performance moves indoors, semi-staged, for those who hold higher-priced seats (the range is from around $30 to $500). It didn't rain opening night, although an earlier forecast warned it might. But it was cold, which hardly stopped the fancier crowd dressing formally and toughing it out. Outside of Germany, 'Freischütz,' which had a major influence on Wagner and German opera, has lost its popularity. Even in Germany, the one production that has helped keep the opera vital is Achim Freyer's sensationally surreal 1980 staging at Stuttgart Opera, and it still remains in the company's repertory. Freyer, of course, is remembered for L.A. Opera's 2010 'Ring' cycle, not, alas, still in our repertory. On the other hand, Stölzl's production, which premiered last year (each production on the Seebühne is given over two summers) and can be streamed, already feels stale in its goth ghoulishness. The devil, Samuel, becomes here a creepy wise-cracking narrator. The hunter, Max, is a clerk. His fiancée, whom he accidentally kills with the devil's bullet, seems more interested in her maid than the clerk. The wintery set is a zombie-infested village that had been destroyed in the Thirty Years' War. Somehow, though, the singers (there are multiple casts and conductors over the summer) manage to impress as they tromp in and out of a presumably frigid lake. What impressed far more was how good they sounded. There were no large speakers visible, and the orchestra remains inside the theater. Yet amplification proved beguiling. Directionality of the singers was true to life. There were many startlingly realistic sound effects, including thunder off in the distance that fooled me into fretting that I had not come prepared for a thunderstorm. The gorgeous, stately production of 'Oedipe,' which follows Oedipus from birth to his final years, couldn't have been more different. Any commentary you pick up is certain to describe this French opera by a Romanian composer, which Enescu worked on for a quarter century before completing in 1931, as one of greatest operas of the 20th century. The premiere in 1936 in Paris was a triumph, but the work remained inexplicably little seen outside of Bucharest, where it was performed, not to the composer's liking, in Romanian. I didn't see any L.A. caps or T-shirts in the Festspielhaus for the first of the three 'Oedipe' performances, but a native Angeleno conductor, Lawrence Foster, is responsible for the first major revival of the opera. Foster, who was a regular conductor at Music Center Opera (now L.A. Opera) in its early years, made the first major recording of 'Oedipe' in Monte Carlo with an all-star cast, giving the opera widespread attention. Even so, 'Oedipe' has remained little mounted, and perhaps Andreas Kriegenburg's incandescent Bregenz production will be what it finally takes to revive 'Oedipe' for real. It just so happened that it was Kent Nagano, shortly after he resigned as music director of L.A. Opera in 2006 to head Bavarian State Opera in Munich, who enticed Kriegenburg, a noted Berlin theater director, to try his hand at opera with a celebrated production of 'Wozzeck.' A miraculous Kriegenburg production of Wagner's 'Ring' followed in which characters and the chorus became the scenery. Kriegenburg has done that again, pitting Oedipus, the individual, against a world, in the form of a chorus, that was against him from the start, foreordained as he was by the gods to kill his father and marry his mother. The revelation of Enescu's opera is both the intensity with which Oedipus tries to be a useful member of society, and how, after having paid his penance as a blind old beggar with only his daughter as companion, finds salvation through enlightenment. Enescu's score weaves East and West, the archaic and the modern, with the ancient Greek source of the myth turned Eastward. In the process, the cosmopolitan modernist composer connects seemingly modernist devices like microtones to their historic roots. Hannu Lintu conducts here with extreme clarity of purpose, every detail worth noting. The large cast, headed by Paul Gay as a commanding Oedipus, excels, while the great Prague Philharmonic Choir puts the full scope of the drama in perspective. In the end, though, Lintu's clearheadedness and Gay's visceral power lack the suspension of reality needed for the spiritual elevation of Oedipus' redemption, which is painfully drawn out — significantly lengthening an already long and challenging work. Nonetheless, this production finds the sublimity in our submission to fate, whatever that may be. The Bregenz Festival's fate, it has just learned, is that its government funding for next summer will be foolishly cut by 30%, around $3 million. The sublimity of this 'Oedipe' is fateful thanks to the festival's probing new artistic director, Finnish mezzo-soprano Lilli Paasikivi. Her first Seebühne production will be 'La Traviata' next summer. She may have to be frugal, but the festival has many corporate sponsors, Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola and Leica Camera among them, along with its massive crowd of ticket buyers. On the other hand, L.A.-sporting folks in Bregenz should maybe be careful what they wish for. The cutback in federal funding for the arts in Austria sounds a little too close to home.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Alien: Earth creator says the upcoming sci-fi show will dedicate more screentime than any of the movies to the Xenomorph, Facehuggers, and a few new creatures: "I am trying to re-mystify Alien"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Get ready Alien fans, because the first TV show in the franchise is set to have even more Xenomorphs, Facehuggers, and creatures than ever before, with more screentime than the monsters were allowed in previous movies. "We're seeing more [of the] Xenomorph than any of these movies," Alien: Earth director Dana Gonzales to Collider. "All the movies, if you really study them, are like, 20 frames, two seconds, they show the Xenomorph. We have huge sequences where all you're seeing is the Xenomorph." But the Xenomorph has had a little upgrade, as creator Noah Hawley said, "I always felt like it was the least effective when it looked like a guy in a suit," pointing out that the Xenomorph in the original movie can look a little too human at some points. "It's very black in the movie. I wanted to play into more of the bug-like quality of it, so maybe it falls a little more in the roach coloration." Oh, and it can jump too. Director Gonzales explained how with new stunt techniques and wirework, the team was able to "fly the Xeno around," and feature the monster in its full glory rather than only showing parts of it, like so many of the Alien movies do. "So it's not so much just coming out and scaring you and having that kind of jump scare," said Gonzales. "It's literally flying through the air. It's chasing. There's a lot that supports the fact that you see it, and I don't know if those other films had that." As well as the Xenomorph, the show will include a bunch of different creatures. The series begins with a team of space explorers aboard the USCSS Maginot, researching five different Alien lifeforms, including the Orchid, the Eye Midge, the Facehugger, and the Xenomorph. However, when the spacecraft crash-lands on Earth, the creatures are set loose. In the most recent Alien: Earth trailer, we saw a baby Xenomorph, a strange flower-bud-like creature, and an infected goat. But just because you have seen some of those creatures before, don't expect to know exactly how they operate. "I am trying to re-mystify Alien," said Hawley. "So much of what made that first movie and the second movie so horrifying was that every time you thought you knew what the lifecycle of this creature was, it just got worse… I've tried to come up with ways that the show returns that sense of, 'What's going to happen next? That's so gross!'" Alien: Earth stars Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young, Timothy Olyphant, and more. Alien: Earth premieres on FX and Hulu in the US on August 12, and will start streaming on Disney Plus in the UK from August 13. For more, check out our list of the best alien movies, and keep up with the most exciting upcoming shows. Solve the daily Crossword
New York Post
2 days ago
- New York Post
I was dead for 2 minutes and I didn't want to leave — what I saw on the other side was beyond belief
A woman who was pronounced dead for two minutes has revealed the shocking discovery of what she saw on 'the other side.' Nicole Meeuws was lifeless in a hospital bed when she supposedly felt 'pulled' from her body and entered a tunnel of light where she was met by 'blue-skinned' beings, she told NeedToKnow. The 49-year-old artist was rushed into emergency surgery after losing her baby, as complications from labor sent her in and out of consciousness. 7 Nicole photographed after passing over to 'the other side.' Jam Press/Nicole Meeuws 'I found myself passing through a tunnel of blue and white light, not a beam, but a corridor that felt alive,' she explained. Meeuws, from Greece, said that the light had a temperature and tone 'almost like music made of water' as she entered a glowing space with 'luminous' colors — silver, soft violets and deep radiant blues. 7 Nicole painting what she saw after being pronounced dead. Jam Press/Nicole Meeuws 'It didn't feel frightening; it felt like I was being called home,' she said. 'The chamber was vast, larger than any earthly structure, and everything pulsed gently like a heartbeat,' she said. 'And then I saw them.' She revealed that she was greeted by 'blue-skinned' beings with human faces — similar to the characters in 'Avatar.' 7 Nicole Meeuws painting her visions. Jam Press/Panagiotis Peikidis 'Two towering beings seated on marble-like thrones, shimmering with energy. Their eyes were large and indigo, filled with kindness and recognition,' she shared. 'They looked human, but had gentle gills on their cheeks. I remember seeing their fish-like tails, rather than legs, covered in scales.' 'They were both male and female intertwined and didn't speak in words – but I understood everything they had to tell me.' She didn't understand their language, but the Avatar-like figures allegedly made her feel at home and telepathically communicated with her that life is actually an illusion, and we start to live when we die. 7 Nicole Meeuws felt 'pulled' from her body and entered a tunnel of light where she was met by 'blue-skinned' beings. Jam Press/Nicole Meeuws She also said they told her that she wasn't meant to have children, and rather, she was given the gift to teach people about 'the other side.' 'I felt more known than I had ever felt in my life; I didn't want to leave,' she said. 'I understood this place, this feeling, and I truly believe it was the original home from which we all come from.' 'I learned that death is not an end, it's a return to our actual lives.' 7 Nicole with her husband, Christos, who is a specialized doctor. Jam Press/Nicole Meeuws Following the 2 minutes in which she was presumably dead, Meeuws was 'zapped' back into her body. When she awoke, her husband Christos, 65, tried to speak to her, but she responded in a high-pitched tone in an 'unfamiliar' language. 'It sounded like dolphin clicks. It continued for minutes, which left everyone around us stunned. But I couldn't stop it — it was coming through me, not from me,' Meeuws explained. 'My senses were heightened and I could hear emotion in people's voices as color. I returned completely different; almost reborn.' 7 A painting made by Nicole showing the Avatar-like faces she saw. Jam Press/Nicole Meeuws Meeuws hasn't had any near-death experiences since the incident, but she said she has visions of the blue-skinned beings often. She believed the creatures are non-alien creatures from the Apkallu interdimensional tribe, also referred to as Demigods, that allegedly have given civilization to mankind. According to Meeuws, the mission given to her by these blue beings is so spread the message that 'love is stronger than death.' 7 Nicole Meeuws entered a glowing space with 'luminous' colors. Jam Press/Nicole Meeuws 'Love will always win; it's where we came from. We're all one big family, regardless of boundaries, cultures, religion and politics. Everything that exists came from the same spark,' she said. 'The more we hold onto fear, hate and lies, the easier it is to control humanity.' 'To create heaven on Earth, we must spend each day spreading love. I'm no longer afraid of death because I know what's waiting for me on the other side. It was a beginning, not an end.'
