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And now, the main event…

Given the coverage over the past week, you could be forgiven for thinking that the most consequential retail event of 2025 was Emily Weiss’s stoop sale—sorry, garage sale—a parasocial spectacle featuring Weiss, her castoff $4,500 Margaux bag, a $600 knit set from The Row, a live D.J., and the irresistible opportunity to bask in the shadow of her $22.1 million Brooklyn Heights townhouse. But in many ways, Weiss was just capitalizing on a trend.

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Increasingly, consumers are seeking out alternatives to the familiar dopamine high and crash of fast fashion, and the impersonal, relatively joyless experience of secondhand shopping online. Intimate, I.R.L. sales like Weiss’s represent a way to recapture the old thrill of the hunt. “Vintage became like fast fashion,” Liana Satenstein of Neverworns told me this week in the days after Weiss rolled up her garage door. Satenstein, a onetime Vogue staffer who has built out a social media business in part by helping the micro-famous (and sometimes just regular famous) clear out their closets in Instagram-ready sales, attributes the allure of such events to that ever-discussed need for personal connection and discovery. (The Cambridge Dictionary just announced “parasocial” as the word of the year.) Or, as she put it more succinctly, these sales stand out in a world where “you can find Jennifer Aniston’s exact Maharishi pants online in seconds.”

Meanwhile, retailers are taking cues from the surge of attention that has surrounded celebrity stoop/garage/closet sales from the likes of Weiss, Jenna Lyons, and Chloë Sevigny. As Satenstein recently wrote, the cure for brick-and-mortar boredom is to eventize shopping with one-off, live experiences that bring online communities together in the real world—like The Row’s fall sample sale, which had lines around the block, or Gwyneth’s Marin Country Mart trunk show.

That need for connection can actually work both ways. For sellers who are sentimental about their closet, Satenstein notes, it matters “where pieces are going—not into a faceless universe.” When former Vogue creative director Sally Singer decided to clean out her closet, for instance, she bypassed the consignment shop route and invited Vogue colleagues over to spend a few bucks on items like a pink Claude Montana jacket from the ’80s.

It almost doesn’t matter if the event is a brand activation, or if the connection between seller and buyer is fleeting—at least something is physically changing hands. Taking home one of Sevigny’s Jean Paul Gaultier double-breasted blazers, Lyons’s white J.Crew button-ups, or even Weiss’s Elder Statesman sweaters is more memorable than making the same purchase through a resale site. (Voyeurism undoubtedly plays a significant role in these affairs, too)

Live shopping pop-ups are often more about the P.R. moment—a photogenic, one-day happening that creates media buzz—than generating revenue. All sales are final, and profits—after staffing, food, logistics, and the time required to plan and execute are factored in—are typically modest. Weiss said she planned to donate 10 percent of the proceeds from her garage sale to charity; others may choose to donate much more, leaning into the sale as a mission-driven, community event.

The usual clumps of (inauthentic) influencers have been largely absent from the best of these sales, which have felt like truly insider affairs for editors and other media elite and curious passersby. Lucky shoppers might have even caught word via flyer. Whether they post about their hauls is up to them.