Chloe Baffert, the head of merchandising at Poshmark, confirms this, noting that interest in Agnès B. cardigans on the secondhand platform peaked a few years ago, largely driven by Gen Z. (Searches for the brand on Poshmark were up 34% year over year in December 2024.)
“Gen Z are discovering French contemporary brands for the first time. They’re attracted to timeless pieces that really fit their values of conscious consumerism,” Baffert argues. “Then, on the flip side, there’s really a nostalgia component: Growing up in the era of Repetto ballet flats and bateau-neck tees, millennials continue to yearn to obtain a style as effortless as Sofia Coppola’s.” These brands are especially appealing on resale, she adds, because shoppers can also find discontinued, limited-edition, or long-sold-out styles.
Petrarca characterizes the snap cardigan as “an affordable piece that also symbolizes something. It symbolizes a certain kind of in-the-know… It’s very French in that it’s an effortlessly cool garment. It’s a sweatshirt, but there are pearl buttons, so that makes it elevated. The allure of the French-girl look is that they just throw something on without thinking, and their hair is in a messy bun, but they somehow look so chic.”
This phenomenon, however, is happening at higher price points, too. Jalil Johnson, stylist and author of the Consider Yourself Cultured newsletter, had been amassing a small collection of Charvet for years before he actually got to visit the famous store in Paris. He was first introduced to the luxury brand, which was founded in the 1830s, via a deleted scene from The September Issue where André Leon Talley goes to the shop on Place Vendôme to get shirts custom-made, and was finally influenced to purchase Charvet’s slippers through Washington Post fashion critic and fellow newsletter author Rachel Tashjian. (He was working at Saks Fifth Avenue at the time, and was able to use his employee discount.) “I still have them—red suede,” he says.
Most of Johnson’s acquisitions came via the secondhand market: a shirt from a thrift store, and a scarf from The Real Real. On the occasion of his first-ever trip to Paris last September, he knew Charvet was a requisite stop. “I even made it a point to book an Airbnb that was just two minutes away, so that I could be very close,” he says. The publicist Gabby Katz connected him to her sales associate, who’s also model Paloma Elsesser’s go-to. “I ran into Paloma and went shopping with her, which was actually really fun.”
