The Fashionistas Among the Recessionistas

If you're looking for guilt-free shopping this recession, look no further then the high-end thrift-store Housing Works, where the rich take their gently used designer clothes, furniture, and knickknacks for the rest of us to pick through.

Last night at the Rubin Museum of Art,  Housing Works held a benefit sample sale and silent auction hosted by Marc Jacobs.  The goal was to raise $500,000 to help the homeless living with AIDS. Guests included fancy department store directors like Julie Gilhart of Barneys, designers Jane Mayle and Heike Jarick, and models Emina Cunmulaj and Ana Mihajlovic.

With the recession hitting with full force, the same people who donate to Housing Works are now also shopping there. The president  of Housing Works, Richard Vorisek, a former Ralph Lauren executive, says more and more Wall Street-types are hitting his stores for bargains.

But while sales are up 10 percent, donations are down 10 percent as people shop less and hold onto what they already have. They're also selling the good stuff for cash rather than donate it.

"We really need donations because the people who get hurt by this economy the most, are the first to be let go and lose their benefits, they're the ones we help," Vorisek says.

Housing Works earns $13 million annually, of which 88 percent goes to providing housing, meals, job training, and other services for low-income and homeless New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS. The stores run on 80 percent earned income with very little coming from grants.  

Vorisek has a plan to keep people donating and giving their Manolo Blahniks, which can be sold at a premium, rather than their mass-market Aldos.

"We're going to start to do targeted donations in neighborhoods like Tribeca, where we set up a truck station on the first Saturday of the month to encourage people to donate."

This strategy takes effect next spring, but will the first quarter of 2009 give us reason to hold on to our goods even tighter, or running to the nearest pawn shop?

Though luxury retail stores and the rest of us would like to get frozen like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky (yes, some of us watched the entire movie) and sit out the next year or two, major high-end stores are employing strategies to keep us shopping.

According to Kevin Harter, the men's fashion director of Bloomingdale's, it's all about creating a guilt-free shopping experience by marketing must-haves.

Harter points to the hot sales of Bloomingdales' Beatle iPods as an example. They retail for $795 each. Some  250 units were sold online last week alone.

"Everyone's going to have to reinvent luxury shopping," Harter says. "You're going to see more diffusion lines like Marc by Marc Jacobs."

Big-name luxury department stores will also be competing to lock down exclusive deals with designers. It's all about selling uniqueness and exclusivity in this market,  according to Harter.

But Kathryn Finney, the founder and editor of the website The Budget Fashionista, says that Wal-Mart will be the place to shop and to expect big name designers "begging" to be sold there. Finney even predicts Cosco will run a few items made by runway designers.

"2009 will be a year of great change in our lives and in our fashions, in everything," says Finney. "Wal-Mart will be the place to go...and New Yorkers will be renting cars to go to Secaucus."

Andrea Chalupa