HAUTE Pursuit

Red-eyes. Resale ALERTS. Proxy services. SECRET WhatsApps. Meet the SUPERSHOPPERS, who approach buying clothes like it's an OLYMPIC SPORT-and relish the THRILL of the HUNT.

- TEXT BY MAGGIE BULLOCK

THE WHITE STRIPES' anthem "Seven Nation Army" never fails to have a Proustian effect on Bianca Jebbia. Every time she hears it, Jebbia flashes back to the first time she walked into the Marni boutique on Mercer Street in New York. More than two decades later, she recalls entering a futuristic gallery of fashion, with clothes suspended from chrome rails as seriously as fine art, and Jack White screeching on the stereo—as he was in most places circa 2003—and being struck by an immediate, almost cosmic certainty: By this she means not just a woman who wears Marni but an actual item from the Marni Spring 2003 collection. For Jebbia, this was love at first sight. But alas, it was unrequited. At the time, she was a 20-something salesperson. She sold designer retail; she didn't shop it.

Today, Jebbia is a Chanel-collecting fixture in the front rows of Schiaparelli, Chloé, and Junya Watanabe with the resources—and the drive—to hunt down treasures from fashion's past and present.

She reminisces about “the ones that got away” as wistfully as one might recall a formative lover. It's not just Marni; Jebbia has “a guy” who sources her spiky-kneed leather pants from Undercover. On 1stDibs, she tracked down Chanel lederhosen from the 2014 Métiers d'Art collection—because, she says, “Why not sit around having coffee at home in lederhosen?”

Call her a supershopper: a new, ultra-determined breed for whom tracking down Items new and old has become something more obsessive than a mere pastime. It's more like an Olympic sport—and the more elaborate, time-consuming, and überniche the chase, the better. Is the item in question sold out? Supershoppers don't take no for an answer. Is there only one left on the planet and it’s locked in a Siberian warehouse guarded by rabid dogs? Supershoppers play the long game. After all, nothing ever became a holy grail by being easy to get.