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Ahead of the Vogue Vintage Sale on 29 March, co-hosted by Jorja Smith and Iris Law and presented by eBay, Vogue is celebrating all things pre-loved. Not all vintage treasures are rare designer pieces loaded with fashion lore: from a perfectly worn leather jacket uncovered in a thrift store to a slogan tee sourced online, pre-loved items can (and should) be a key player in every modern wardrobe.
Nowadays, there’s no shortage of fan accounts ready to ID the clothes featured in our favourite television shows (see the And Just Like That… and The White Lotus dedicated IGs that have popped up in recent times). Back in the Noughties, though, fans would rely on “Shop the look” pages in magazines – although it would largely be formed of high-street alternatives, rather than the exact pieces themselves.
That’s where vintage – and TV – obsessive Chloe Jukes comes in. “I’m 30 now, so I grew up in the era of Friends, Sex and the City and Clueless,” she tells Vogue over the phone. “I’ve always loved on-screen fashion and realised that the pieces still exist in the world, and just became obsessed with tracking them down for myself personally.”
It was while on maternity leave that the head hunter (“I work in talent acquisition, so finding people rather than clothes,” she jokes), decided to set up her online eBay store, Screen Icons Closet, to capitalise on the wider demand for these items. “I’d be finding things that were just way too small for me, and needed to sell them on,” she explains how the idea of the store came about.
Of course, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Noughties TV and film, and the fashion from the era, is required in order to track down these specific pieces, which in some cases are more than 20 years old at this point. What’s Jukes’s secret? “I do a lot of research, looking at costume designer interviews, going through runway collections of those eras,” she says. “You get a sense of which brands a character generally wears, which helps a lot.”
Case in point: while trawling through a rail of vintage Moschino, she instantly recognised the green tweed blazer worn by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. “I think it helps that I watched these movies and shows about a million times,” she says. Another favourite find? The Moschino doll dress worn by Brittany Murphy in Uptown Girls. “It was one that I had been looking for every day for about two years,” she recalls. “That’s one that I get messages about constantly, more than anything else that I’ve sold.”
While many of the pieces are high-end, there are some more affordable pieces in the mix, too: many of the evening dresses worn in Friends are from LA brand Laundry by Shelli Segal, while some of Blair Waldorf’s most recognisable outerwear was actually sourced from Zara (although some of the pieces are still “amazingly difficult to track down”).
Currently on top of Jukes’s wishlist is the cardigan that Elle wears when she gets kicked out of the class in Legally Blonde – “reported to be Missoni, but I’m not sure how accurate that is”. For the vintage dealer, it’s all about that sense of accomplishment she feels when she’s managed to finally find something. “Even just figuring out the brand sometimes is half the battle,” she says. “I love the thrill of the hunt.”
