Oh, This? I Got It From My WhatsApp Girl.

This winter, I was in the market for a very particular vintage shirt: a Grateful Dead concert tee featuring bedazzled sheet music for “Sugar Magnolia.” My mom had bought one at a show in the ’80s, and over the intervening decades, my sister and I wore it until the seams literally gave out. (It’s still in my closet, but the rips in it are so large that it’s impossible to tell which are holes for your extremities and which are just… holes.) So when I read about Disorder Vintage, an archival band tee seller on Instagram, I DMed to see if they could track it down. Six weeks later, a package arrived from a collector they’d found in Virginia. Inside wasn’t just my new favorite shirt. It was my new favorite story.

Suddenly I found myself hooked on resale — scooping up a pair of 1970s poodle-shaped lamps on eBay; buying seriously underpriced Stuart Weitzman satin pumps — in search of not just deals but a sense of superiority. In our TikTok shop-ified, two-days-to-your-doorstep fashion landscape, shopping has never been more seamless. Like a stranger’s button-up? Snag a pic, reverse Google image search it… and voila! It’s yours. Desperate for a bridesmaid dress out of your price range? Rent it on sites Pickle and Armoire, or use AfterPay to purchase it in installments. As such, having a sizable, expensive, and of-the-moment wardrobe is no longer the flex it used to be. The only thing that can truly earn you bragging points is a good, one-of-a-kind score. “It’s so coveted because of the algorithmic blandness and emptiness [we’re experiencing],” says Substack fashion writer Viv Chen.

To help shoppers fill the void, there’s been a surge of secondhand experts and curators emerging on Instagram, Substack, and invite-only WhatsApp chats. Chen’s The Molehill newsletter gives readers tips and tricks for shopping Japanese eBay and sourcing ’70s Elsa Peretti jewelry. Laura Reilly’s Magasin provides paywalled promo codes for rarely on sale designers. And Lizzie Wheeler, a stylist who primarily works in bridal, posts curated resale links as well as Close-Friends closet sales on her Instagram account, @shit.u.should.buy. “Ten years ago, [my clients] would have wanted the Oscar de la Renta gown. Now, they’re coming to me, and they’re saying, ‘I want every look for my wedding to be one of a kind, sourced vintage,’” Wheeler tells me. “They’re always like, ‘I want people to be whispering, ‘Oh, my God, where did she find that?’”

While the online consignment market is nothing new (Depop, The RealReal, and Poshmark all launched in 2011; eBay’s been around since 1995), it’s been experiencing record growth in recent years. A recent CapitalOne shopping report noted that the U.S. thrifting and resale market has more than doubled since 2018. (According to Pinterest’s fall 2025 trend report, searches for “dream thrift finds” were also up 550%.) Beyond the obvious — thrifted goods typically have a more affordable price point — celebrity styling has shaped our tastes as well. “Outfitting the hottest celebrities in referential looks that have an element of ’90s and 2000s nostalgia has fueled a lot of that fire,” Chen says of stars like Kylie Jenner, who attended the Golden Globes in a Versace made famous by Elizabeth Hurley in the ’90s, or Sabrina Carpenter wearing the white Bob Mackie gown Madonna donned for the cover of Vanity Fair.

These whisper networks aren’t strictly online, either. Neverworns writer Liana Satenstein, a former Vogue staffer who grew up trailing her antique-dealer mom around flea markets, turned her passion for discounts and discovery into a career organizing high-end closet sales, like Chloë Sevigny’s “Sale of the Century.” “These events and sales where you have to get up and go to it, or at least have the knowledge to go online and look at what they're offering, adds a little bit of friction that we need with shopping right now,” Satenstein says. “Online can be so sterile.”

In-person, event-format sales — be it the ones where you get to shop the closets of Jenna Lyons and Paloma Elsesser or samples from brands like Dôen, Ulla Johnson, and Cult Gaia — have grown so popular that there are now influencers who specialize in how to navigate them. “I have a broadcast channel on my Instagram where I’m updating people, like ‘Hey, I’m checking out this sale today; here’s the prices; this is what the line is like,’” says Tita Loyek (@titatots), dubbed the “sample sale bestie” by the New York Post. Loyek also moderates a WhatsApp group that has more than 4,700 subscribers where people can write in with more specific questions. “Some people are taking time off of work to go and coming in from New Jersey, Connecticut, or Brooklyn. So being able to have information like ‘Yes, there are size 12s here; it’s inclusive’ has been super beneficial for people.”

As of now, admission to Loyek’s WhatsApp group is free of charge and open to all. And while other curators like Chen or Wheeler make some money off affiliate links, the commission rates are negligible (around 1% or less, versus retailers like Nordstrom where shop-at-link-in-bio types can earn up to 11% off of new items). The real payoff isn’t in commissions but in the community these services build, which can be leveraged in other ways.

For Chen, it’s in the paid subscriptions to her Substack, where just $8 per month grants you access to her private Google Doc full of secondhand shopping links and to a subscriber chat where followers trade vintage shop recs, organize clothing swaps — and, every now and then, help Chen track down one of her holy grail items. Like the Issey Miyake bubble print skirt a reader agreed to order her off of Vinted UK — a website nearly impossible to buy from in the United States without a proxy or VPN. “It came in the mail a few weeks later, and she included a really cute handwritten note as well,” says Chen, who reimbursed the reader and comped her subscription. “That was something I wouldn’t have been able to source without the Molehill chat network.” Another perfect find, another even better story.