Kimaya Banga doesn’t have children, but she does have babies. They’re called Kelly, Lady and Flap. (Unusual, yes, but no more than the average celebrity spawn.) Their first names, if you haven’t guessed? Hermés, Dior and Chanel. “I call my luxury bags my babies,” Banga, 34, tells me fondly. “I clean them, I take care of them, they get to come out of my closet every fifteen days—” I interrupt. “As in, you take them for walks?” Banga is nonplussed. “Yeah, you could put it like that.”
In another sense, though, Banga’s relationship with her luxury bags mirrors more that of a stock trader. She has lost track, really, of the number of bags she’s bought and resold throughout her almost decade-long hobby. “Maybe 50-80?’ she guesses. Eight years ago, she was living in London when she fell for a Fendi Baguette on the global resale marketplace Vestiaire Collective. She stoked the fires of her love for designer vintage from there, picking up a few new (to her) pieces every year. When Banga returned to India, the local vintage designer scene was nascent — but that quickly changed. Now, in 2024, it’s booming, and set to hit ₹ 1,556 million by 2032.
Global platforms like The RealReal are active in India, but many local sellers and buyers profess an inclination towards home-run companies, like Confidential Couture, one of the first players on the market back in 2014, and My Almari, which began in 2023.
Banga made a purchase on My Almari within a few days of its launching: a coveted, preloved Goyard tote. Goyard doesn’t have a store in India, so her purchase, she explains, was a matter of necessity (if a bag worth ₹ 4,50,000 can ever be put in the same sentence as the word ‘necessity’). Soon, she made her first sale, too.
Like a growing cadre of women staking out luxury resale platforms, Banga has a fluid relationship with most of her designer pieces. She prefers to keep her wardrobe tightly curated, enjoying the pieces she loves for a season or two before reselling them to make space for the next hot commodity. “You grow out of a style, you grow out of a fashion. Trends change every three or four years, right? If I haven’t used something for six to nine months, I sell it. Period.”
She’s not the only one. In RealReal’s latest Luxury Resale Report, the global platform found that, around the world, dabbling in the resale market the same way some might scour stock markets is gaining momentum. Young women, particularly, are catching on to the ability to upgrade their wardrobes within the minute, swapping out well-loved pieces for the hot new thing. It found that Gen X resells the most, while Gen Z resells the fastest. The latter reconsigned 52% more than in previous years, especially in the women’s category.
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