The Thrill of the Chase

Looking for that rarer-than-rare vintage McQueen or Marc Jacobs? José Criales-Unzueta tracks down the new wave of vintage hunters.

As I join a video call with Johnny Valencia, the founder of Pechuga Vintage, I notice his attention split between two screens: his phone’s, where he’s talking to me from Los Angeles, and his computer’s, where he’s scrutinizing an online auction of Mouna Ayoub’s Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld collection. The French Lebanese socialite is doing away with 252 pieces from her substantial haute couture archive, and Valencia is eyeing the magnificent black silk crepe gown from Chanel’s 1992 couture collection that Christy Turlington first wore on the runway, and that Lily-Rose Depp reintroduced at the 2019 Met Gala.

“I like to see myself as a vessel for transitory beauty,” says Valencia with a laugh. The vintage dealer, who started his business officially in 2018 after years of amateur thrifting amid a career in the buying team at Vivienne Westwood, is part of a new generation of fiercely proactive hunters whom fashion fanatics around the world enlist to find the buzziest and most highly sought-after vintage of the moment. That one archive Chanel fall 1991 belt that Linda Evangelista wore on the runway? Valencia’s got it. The elusive Marc Jacobs Kiki boots? Doja Cat bought them from his shop.