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Marshall and Bernardin were certainly prescient when they decided to launch ReSee. It’s almost hard to imagine, given how much the pre-loved has become part of how we shop and style ourselves. Ten years ago, we were, for the most part, still shopping in an era where vintage was either super-fancy and expensive, destined for collectors and celebrities alike, or we were out rummaging around Portobello Road or the Rose Bowl at the crack of dawn with a dream of finding something amazing. Stores selling near-vintage via consignment were certainly a mainstay of New York—I moved here and discovered the likes of Tokio 7 and Ina; we had nothing like them in London—but the market certainly didn’t have the online presence or ubiquity it has now. And like so many of the best business ideas, ReSee came out of what Marshall and Bernardin were looking for themselves, figuring that they were likely not alone.
“Sabrina and I were having lunch at Toraya [a Japanese tea room in Paris] and talking about the wonderful collections of the last few years—Nicolas Ghesquière’s scuba collection of spring 2002, or Mrs. Prada’s lip prints in 2000,” says Bernardin, “and how we couldn’t afford any of them. We were chatting about how amazing it would be if we could create a space where people could find those iconic collections again—in a space that was curated, and which showed you how to wear those things in a modern and relevant way. Not just an archival spot, which targets collectors and people who buy things to keep them in their closets, but women who want to see how they can wear pieces today. We’d grown up in a time in fashion when everything you wore had to be that season. That phrase ‘So last season’ was ingrained in all of our heads—that you just had to keep up. And Sabrina and I felt there was something innately wrong about that.”
What they did differently, Marshall says, was give an editorialized, high-fashion treatment to the pieces they selected: ReSee wasn’t a come-one, come-all marketplace, but somewhere you’d find strong curation of the pieces that had entered fashion’s nowhereland: Things not old enough to be vintage, yet not new enough to be considered desirable given the prevailing mindset; where everything they would sell was treated with respect. “When we started, we would sit there,” recalls Bernardin, “and say to each other, ‘Babe, how much would you pay for this?’ And we’d say, ‘Oh my God—at that price I’d get it.’ I think women understand that it’s cool and modern to wear things which are a few seasons old.”
