SHE WHO PARES WINS

As fashion royalty and an influencer in her own right, Julia Restoin Roitfeld is an unlikely wardrobe minimalist, but her new platform champions buying less but better. She tells Divya Bala why simplicity is the last word in sophistication

JULIA RESTOIN ROITFELD is very good at cutting out what she doesn’t need. In fact, it’s in her blood. “Yeah, we’re pretty good at editing,” she admits from her New York home on a rare day off. She is, of course, referring to herself and her mother, French fashion editor and BAZAAR global fashion director Carine Roitfeld. When I balk at the fact that a fashion scion would have such lean taste, she is quick to correct me. “You know, that’s not so true. We’re very different, my mom and I. I’m more minimalist than her, I’m less into trends than her, but we are very good at buying pieces we really love. We worship them and keep them for years — in my mum’s case, decades. I think that’s great for someone like her, with millions of followers, to show that it’s OK to wear the same dress over and over. I get overwhelmed if I wake up and there’s a lot in my wardrobe.”

For those of us who suffer from BIHNTWS (But I Have Nothing To Wear Syndrome) as we stand in front of a closetful of clothes, this might be a little hard to comprehend. However, Restoin Roitfeld is part of a greater consumer movement towards buying better, more secondhand and more sustainably. In the 2019 Resale Report from ThredUp, the world’s largest fashion resale marketplace, third-party analytics revealed that 74 per cent of 18–29-year-olds prefer to buy from sustainably conscious brands and 64 per cent of women bought or are now willing to buy secondhand, evident in the rise of resale platforms such as ThredUp, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective and Vinted (and of rental services such as Rent the Runway). The secondhand market is projected to grow to nearly 1.5 times the size of fast fashion by 2028.