Exclusive | Meet the fashion super collectors who go to wild extremes to dress head to toe in their favorite designer
How far would you go for fashion? A street-clogging line for cool sneakers? An early-morning alarm for a sample sale? A Bradshaw-style stash of Jimmy Choos in your oven, which you only use for storage?For Laura Gallo-Willis, that’s kid stuff.Recently, the real estate entrepreneur hopped on an international flight to Paris for a Chanel blazer that cost more than the plane ticket.“I don’t feel myself,” Gallo-Willis told The Post, “if I don’t have anything Chanel on.”Gallo-Willis is a proud fashion hoarder, devoting rooms in her London mansion to her Chanel stash — and spending an estimated $1.1 million on pieces that range from classic black jackets to kooky resin clutches shaped like old-school mix tapes.She’s part of a growing global club of style junkies who will do anything for a style score, from stalking former Juicy Couture employees online to moving upstate just to make room for 300 Ralph Lauren jackets. Here’s what some of these fashion hoarders will do to get their frock fix, from chasing a designer sweatsuit across Chicago to filling a bathtub with curtain cleaner to restore a wrecked prom dress. Here’s what some of these fashion hoarders will do to get their frock fix, from chasing a designer sweatsuit across Chicago to filling a bathtub with curtain cleaner to restore a wrecked prom dress. When Betsey Johnson’s company went bankrupt in 2012, the 69-year-old designer moved from New York to California — and offloaded her piles of designer prom gear at a Hamptons estate sale.
That included most of the brand’s samples — outrageous pieces made exclusively for runway shows that never made it to regular stores.Steph Ermer, a 37-year-old Betsey Johnson obsessive in Florida, knew the mass taffeta purge meant one thing: Those rare pieces were somewhere out there to buy.Even better, since Johnson once used real people on the catwalk, a few one-off pieces were large enough for Ermer, who’s a size 6 to 8.
She sprang into acti...