by On a recent afternoon in SoHo, Seth Weisser and Gerard Maione were visiting their store, What Goes Around Comes Around, an upscale vintage store. boutique on West Broadway, which has long been a central destination for stylists and celebrities.
They passed Jean Paul Gaultier shirts from the late ’80s and Harley-Davidson motorcycle jackets from the ’60s before entering the area containing his extensive Levi’s collection. Weisser, wearing a vintage Hermès jacket, gingerly picked up a pair of jeans from the 1950s. The price was $3,000.
“These may look like regular Levi’s, but the denim connoisseur who sees someone wearing them will know exactly what they are,” he said. “This is the beginning of quiet luxury.”
One of his regular clients, Stephen Diggsa wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills, was looking near a mannequin holding a quilted Chanel bag made in the 1990s.
“You beat my Jets yesterday,” Mr. Maione shouted.
“Yeah, but you guys beat us last time,” Mr. Diggs replied.
Mr. Diggs ended up buying two Chanel bags. Outside the store, a friend took photos of him modeling his purchases in front of a truck.
“I’ve been shopping at What Goes Around Comes Around for a long time,” Diggs said, mid-pose. “I like vintage because it’s timeless, so I like to combine it here.”
Weisser, 56, and Maione, 55, grew up in neighboring Long Island towns. Mr. Weisser’s mother was a gym teacher and his father was a lawyer; Mr. Maione’s family ran an Italian delicatessen.
The two men became friends at Syracuse University in the late 1980s. saving at street fairs and flea markets in the 1990s, when they learned that their best chance of getting into Manhattan nightclubs like Spy Bar was to look stylish.
The search for vintage became his obsession. At a junk shop in the Bronx, they filled trash bags with rock concert T-shirts and a pair of Levi’s made during the Eisenhower administration; In the parking lot of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, they bought rare denim from the backs of pickup trucks.
They opened What Goes Around Comes Around in 1993. In those days, secondhand meant second-rate for much of the fashion industry, and the duo saw themselves as downtown entrepreneurs whose mission was to preach the gospel of vintage.
“The stigma was that people felt it was beneath them to buy something used,” Weisser said, “but we felt that wearing vintage clothing gave someone individuality.”
His early regulars included Jean Paul Gaultier and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. “Sex and the City” stylists found outfits there for the show’s star, Sarah Jessica Parker, who also became a client.
“New York has a long history of vintage, but it’s the way they sought out pieces with heritage that always made them stand out,” Ms. Parker said. “There will be only one of something, not multiples. And that’s when vintage becomes really special.”
“They are not the RealReal,” he added. “What they do feels a little more rarefied. Sometimes you have to be a bit of a fashion historian to understand what they have, but it’s worth the effort.”
After three decades in business, What Goes Around Comes Around has an outpost in Beverly Hills and a second boutique recently opened in SoHo. Her client base includes Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Lenny Kravitz and Kate Moss. Items now on sale include an Hermès “pochette” bag ($34,500), a Chrome Hearts crocodile zipper bag ($3,500) and a Christian Dior leather cap ($775).
In recent years, as high-end vintage clothing became a booming business, Weisser and Maione found themselves competing against venture capital-backed shipping platform RealReal, the online marketplace Vestiaire Collective and other similar businesses.
To strengthen their e-commerce division, they recently opened an online store, in camaraderie with Amazon and began producing a live shopping stream series brought to you by handbag historian Mason Howell. Episodes include “Gossip Girl Style” and “Inspired by Priscilla Presley.”
“In terms of all of our online competition, we were a little late to the game in pursuing that idea, so we had to decide how to differentiate ourselves,” Mr. Weisser said.
Maione said his rivals buy more indiscriminately. “A lot of things are nonsense,” he said. “We make selections at a very high level, and the only closets we go to are the ones we know have top-notch pieces.”
“That’s why we hire stylists and celebrities,” he continued. “Because they know they’ll be the only ones who will use something if we gave it to them.”
They also reflected on a less obvious advantage they might have over the competition: their decades-long friendship.
“We’ve been through a lot together, from recessions to 9/11,” Maione said. “But we always have each other.”
Their bond, they said, helped them endure a painful downsizing during the pandemic that forced them to close locations in Miami, East Hampton and the Upper East Side. Since 2018, they are also in litigation with Chanel, which sued What Goes Around Comes for trademark infringement, a charge that deny. (Chanel, which has a difficult relationship with the luxury resale sector, defendant the realreal that same year.)
When asked how they search for vintage clothing these days, Weisser and Maione said the details of the acquisition are trade secrets, but they admitted that they visit the closets of a chic eccentric on Central Park South and make regular trips. to the Parisian market of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine.
“We are still struggling to get to the best cabinets,” Weisser said. “Hunting is what keeps us going.”
As night approached, the duo drove through the Holland Tunnel toward their 35,000-square-foot warehouse in Jersey City. They boarded a freight elevator and toured cavernous warehouses filled with boxes of Rolex watches, packs of 1970s rock concert T-shirts, and towering stacks of monogrammed Louis Vuitton handbags.
They visited their e-commerce team and greeted a member of their authentication division, who was examining a Gucci bag with a magnifying glass for signs of sophisticated counterfeiting. Then they entered a room filled with stacks of Levi’s.
Mr. Maione ran his hand over a pair of jeans with some tears in the fabric.
“It’s getting harder to find old Levi’s,” he said. “There’s not much of that left out there anymore. The source of all this is drying up. But denim never goes wrong. “It only gets better.”
