Julia Fox Was “This Close” To Selling Her Wedding Dress

Julia Fox is spring cleaning — but instead of hauling her discarded pieces to the nearest thrift store, she turned her legendary wardrobe into a full-blown style event. Her unhinged-in-the-best-way fashion archive deserves more than hanging at a random vintage store. After all, these aren’t just clothes; they’re genuine cultural artifacts that deserve new owners who’ll wear them just as chicly and rebelliously as she did.

Thankfully, Fox understood the assignment: She teamed up with eBay and fashion-favorite newsletter Drafting for the latest installment of the e-tailer’s ongoing stoop sale series. On May 16, style obsessives lined up around the block in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood just to grab a piece of Fox’s history. The 400-item curation featured some of her most iconic lookbook moments. While in-person attendees grabbed pieces on-site, fans can still score remaining items through her official eBay store page, including the boots straight from her Uncut Gems wardrobe, her viral MetroCard ’fit — and even the bedazzled Steve Madden pumps she wore to her wedding.

Though she held onto the sparkly pair for nearly a decade, parting ways with them wasn’t an emotional heartbreak; it was a reality check. “I just didn’t wear them,” Fox tells Bustle on-site at the sale. “I was never going to wear them again.”

And since her sale’s proceeds would benefit the Rosebuds Reading Collective — a book-centered organization supporting incarcerated women at Rikers Island — she didn’t think twice. She’s not sentimental that way. “As long as there’s no emotional attachment to [a partner], we can give the clothes a new identity and a new emotional essence. We’re so powerful,” she says.

In fact, Fox openly advocates for hoarding treasures from past relationships. “Keep everything that an ex gives you,” she says. “I have so many things that boyfriends have given me. To me, they’re just a thing.”

The one major exception to her zero-sentimentality rule: her Las Vegas wedding dress. Back on New Year’s Day in 2018, the Down the Drain author married Peter Artemiev in one of her most memorable ensembles. (And that’s saying something.) “I was dressed like a cowgirl, and [Peter] wore cowboy boots. We looked so f*cking cute,” she previously shared on her Forbidden Fruits podcast. “We were so in love.”

They were married for two years before calling it quits, but her bridal look isn't going anywhere. “I still have the little dress I wore, and ultimately that’s all I need to keep,” Fox says, though she admits she came dangerously close to adding it to the auction block: “I actually toyed with the idea of selling the dress, too.” Her decision to hold onto the gown was made solely with the pair’s 5-year-old son, Valentino, in mind. “It was the dress I wore when I married his daddy, so I kept it for that,” she says. “But I was this close to throwing it in the pile as well.”