Grailed Continues to Build a Menswear Utopia

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Grailed, the popular men’s resale site, bundled 100 of the most desirable menswear items just eight months ago to create the original Grailed 100. Everything was packaged together with original photography and descriptions of its importance in menswear history.

Now, the site has restocked its vaults with another set. If you missed out on the ultra-rare pieces from designers like Raf Simons, Undercover, Rick Owens, and Helmut Lang the last time around, this is your second chance. Welcome to the Grailed 100, Part 2: Way More Grailed-ier.

Grailed’s brand director Lawrence Schlossman describes it as “a microcosm of the community.” The bundle includes several new Raf pieces that will get archivists drooling; the Helmut Lang bulletproof vest that was so important to Kanye’s Yeezy Season 1; a crewneck sweatshirt from Gosha Rubchinskiy’s 2009 Evil Empire collection that was never even sold at retail; and a Dolce & Gabbana parka made out of patched-together military fabrics that stands out from the rest of the label’s more refined offerings.

And for the Grailed team, the collection of items isn’t just about putting on the internet’s best digital flea market: It’s about putting forth what Grailed is about as a site right now, and what it hopes to be in the future. For now, that means “creating 100 ideal transactions,” Schlossman says.

The hope is that a customer buys an item that was difficult or impossible to find before at a price that is fair to both parties, not just a reseller. (Grailed sets prices a little lower so that these items can be bought by people who actually want to keep and wear them.) The site’s also instituted a policy that items bought from the 100 can’t be resold there for at least a month.

The project is also about putting Grailed on the map and allowing it to really showcase its vision on a large scale. In the future, Schlossman hopes Grailed will be “the de facto menswear hub on the internet where you can read, you can shop, you can interact. We want to create this community and we think the Grailed 100 is an amazing activation that the whole community can galvanize around,” he explains.

As the site builds toward its own perfect vision of itself, the Grailed 100 is an example of how it hopes to merge editorial and shopping in ways that other online publications, like the revamped Style.com, are moving toward. Schlossman believes that the shopping element is key in 2016. “That's a huge advantage,” he says. “It's one thing to have beautiful pictures and another thing to have educational copy, but the fact you can be awed by something, you can learn about something, and buy that thing all in the same place executed at this high of a level. I think it speaks for itself.”

The second Grailed 100 comes along at a time when interest in men’s vintage is on the rise. The site’s cofounder and head of marketing, Jake Metzger, says one reason for the surge is that men are looking to pounce on current trends by wearing archive or vintage clothing. “What's kind of hot right now are elongated cuts, oversized flannels, and oversized bombers, and more and more people are discovering that you can find that style in vintage pieces. People are realizing you don't need to wear the hyped brand or an H&M or Zara.”

In essence, the Grailed 100 is capitalizing on a cyclical fashion cycle, and instead of cherrypicking new clothes that are inspired by these archive pieces, you can just go right to the source. And, as Schlossman says, maybe that is the trend. “I wouldn't even call it vintage, I'd call it an idea of archive becoming a trend,” he says.