‘Why wear a copy when you can wear the original?’ — the vintage fashion dealer to the A-list
Want a classic YSL ‘smoking’ or a rare McQueen? Marie Blanchet will find it
“When Amal [Clooney] wore that dress, we had 500 Instagram followers in a few minutes. I thought there was a bug. I even called IT,” says Marie Blanchet, the Paris-based vintage dealer and founder of Mon Vintage. She’s referring to the 1999 beaded John Galliano dress she sourced for Clooney to wear to the premiere of her husband George’s film Ticket to Paradise in September last year.
A similar stir was caused by Rihanna when she appeared in a 1995 Galliano kimono cocoon coat; by Adwoa Aboah in a Tom Ford for Gucci gown; and by Meghan Markle in a Courrèges haute couture trapeze coat while pregnant, all sourced by Blanchet. Recently, a Grammy-nominated American rapper’s team asked Blanchet for two Hermès bags in time for Christmas — one, a particularly rare tricolour alligator Kelly from 1984, was valued at over €60,000.
Blanchet’s showroom in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés is an Aladdin’s cave of fashion treasures. Hanging from a Pierre Jeanneret screen is a museum-grade cream Balenciaga coat from 1955 and an original toile from Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection, with dress pins placed by the designer himself. A blue-and-white Roberto Cavalli bustier gown, previously on display at the Met, lies languorously on a Charlotte Perriand day bed. There’s a Phoebe Philo for Céline pony-hair coat that never went into production.
By her own admission, Blanchet is a “Parisienne cliché”. When her showroom manager Marylou, smartly dressed in a striped Dior men’s shirt and Balenciaga tie, leads me in, Blanchet is smoking at her laptop, lighting her cigarettes with the Cire Trudon Madeleine candle that scents the space. Her three-legged bull terrier Snoopy, in a Saint Laurent bow, yawns in the corner. Later in the afternoon, she insists we take a champagne break (Ruinart Brut is kept at the showroom at all times for clients and special occasions).
Blanchet, in her thirties, has a cool, insouciant way of wearing high-value vintage. For our interview, she wears an early 1990s Saint Laurent two-button marine suit, black Balenciaga knife sock boots and a Line Vautrin 1930s bronze choker. “Every woman needs to have a Saint Laurent jacket in her wardrobe. And if you can, get a smoking,” she advises.
Blanchet’s love of vintage began in Paris’s Saint Ouen flea market and grew when she was offered the job of costume designer for the 2017 television mini-series Mata Hari. She trained with Parisian vintage legend Françoise Auguet, who could authenticate an unsigned dress by Coco Chanel just by studying the construction.
After a few successful shoe sales on Vestiaire Collective, Blanchet approached the luxury consignment website about creating a vintage category. The company did just that, and made her head of it. “It proved my point,” she says. “Why wear a copy when you could wear the original?”
She describes how she was then headhunted to be CEO of British boutique William Vintage. In 2020, while still in London, she opened Mon Vintage, and was invited to collaborate with Selfridges. “After Covid, we found that people wanted to touch and feel garments. Curation was important — it’s pieces that I truly believe tell a story about the designer and that feel relevant today,” Blanchet says.
Blanchet intended Mon Vintage to be a high-end service that departed from the regular ecommerce model. “We don’t have a website, all our pieces are available upon request through lookbooks. If clients are able to come to our showroom in Paris, they are invited by appointment only. We prepare a rack and do fittings with our couturier and with clients abroad, pieces are shipped, and fittings are done remotely.”
Blanchet and her team also source pieces on request, ranging from €120 for Levi’s to around €100,000 for a Thierry Mugler bustier that made its runway debut on Jerry Hall.
Pieces are generally delivered by hand after being painstakingly disinfected, dry cleaned and restored — a process that can take up to a month. “We never alter anything because we don’t want to lose the integrity of a piece, but we can adjust and tailor.”
Blanchet has an ongoing collaboration with The Row, which included providing rare Line Vautrin jewellery and decorative objects for its spring/summer 2023 show, which are available for purchase in the brand’s stores.
“We don’t see ourselves as archivists and, although we do work with the Palais Galliera, the Met and the Manchester Museum, we sell pieces that are going to have a second life on people who will wear them,” says Blanchet. “We also have collector clients who just want to invest in pieces, not wear them.”
Alexandre Samson, head of the contemporary design department at the Palais Galliera, Paris’s official fashion museum, first worked with Blanchet in 2018 when she lent a pair of Margiela shoes for an exhibition. “What sets her apart is her charisma, combined with a strong sense of current fashion and contemporary women’s needs,” says Samson. “She knows how to transcend the past and adapt it to the present.”
Blanchet keeps her sources — a worldwide network that she has nurtured over the past decade — to herself. “Some amazing pieces are getting rarer to find. And after Covid I noticed small vintage businesses opening through Instagram every day. It’s crazy! But people want curation, authentication, quality control and to know that they are buying from a safe source.”
Soon Blanchet will be heading to Florence to view a private collection of couture and tonight, after our interview, she and Marylou will visit an extensive personal archive of YSL Rive Gauche in Paris. So, if you happen to be in the market for something Saint Laurent and scarce, seek and she shall find.