The RealReal’s 2026 Resale Report finds vintage demand up 432 percent since 2020, with shoppers searching by designer tenure, decade, and city.
“When it was announced that Phoebe was leaving fashion, there was an urgent influx of people buying Philo-era Celine and suddenly [it] became more coveted than ever,” Nediva Sokoll-Ward, founder of the vintage dealer Quell, told Nylon. Saved searches for “Phoebe Philo Celine” on The RealReal are up 650 percent, the steepest of several designer-era spikes in a market where vintage demand has climbed 432 percent since 2020.
The 2026 Resale Report, The (R)evolution of Resale, published this week, draws on 15 years of proprietary data covering more than 50 million items sold to a membership of 44 million, and it tracks how the value of individual pieces moves over time. Shoppers have grown far more particular about which years they want, too: decade-specific saved searches climbed 135 percent over the past year, and searches for 2000s fashion rose 93 percent.
“The RealReal tracks the shifts of the luxury resale marketplace uniquely due to our combination of product depth, history and data,” Rati Sahi Levesque, president and CEO of The RealReal, said in a statement. “Over 15 years and more than 50 million items sold, we’ve built a proprietary dataset that connects what people want with what they own, what they’re selling and what those pieces are worth at any given time. Combined with our authentication expertise and technology to authenticate, price and track millions of unique items, The RealReal has an unmatched ability to understand the real market value of luxury, as well as to see where the market is going before it gets there.”
Designer-era nostalgia is driving luxury resale searches
The specificity runs deeper than a decade; saved searches for “Nicolas Ghesquière Balenciaga” rose 400 percent and “Marc Jacobs Louis Vuitton” 375 percent, with shoppers naming a house, a designer, and the stretch of years the two shared. Searching that way puts a premium on the handful of pieces that survived in wearable condition, most of them made long before resale was a market anyone planned for.
“Though she was not the only designer working in a minimalist vein while at Celine, Philo helped repopularize the aesthetic and forced people to look at it with fresh eyes,” Martin Lerma, an editor and fashion historian, told Nylon of the tenure now drawing the heaviest search traffic.
Where luxury resale demand is concentrated
Taste turns out to be intensely regional, too. Minneapolis buys and sells nearly nine times the national average of Thom Browne, Dallas moves 2.5 times more David Yurman jewelry than the rest of the country, and demand for Montblanc around Tampa and St. Petersburg more than tripled.
Some of the sharpest growth belongs to labels that have not reached the secondhand floor in volume yet. Saved searches jumped 136 percent for Alaïa, 96 percent for Miu Miu, and 88 percent for Loewe, while searches for Matthieu Blazy, the creative director of Chanel, rose 10,967 percent as his first collections for the house began circulating.
Handbags continue to drive interest: the Ferragamo Hug is the report’s breakout, with search interest up 355 percent between the first and second quarters of 2026, growth of 15 percent year over year, and resale prices between $1,500 and $3,400. The Chanel Cerf, a 2005 Karl Lagerfeld design, posted 176 percent year-over-year search growth and resells between $3,000 and $5,000, and The Row’s Terrasse grew 102 percent on the back of the label’s viral Margaux. The Gig, from Philo’s own label, is up 75 percent since its October 2023 debut and averages $2,000 at resale, while Celine’s Halfmoon, a Michael Rider design from late 2025, retails for $2,800 and resells for $2,470. Saint Laurent’s Y tote grew 22 percent, with listings reaching $3,937.
Secondhand shopping has become increasingly mainstream: ninety-three percent of Americans shop online for secondhand items, according to Capital One Shopping’s March 2026 research — the biggest downside is that it leaves dealers competing over the same finite supply. “When I’m sourcing inventory, Celine is one of the few brands that I allow myself to splurge on simply because I know it will sell and won’t be sitting on my shelf for long,” Sokoll-Ward said.
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