How designer clothes make it to your wardrobe (2024)

Getting all this clothing from the runway to your closet is no small effort. Brigitte Chartrand is Ssense’s vice president of womenswear buying, as well as the site’s “Everything Else” section (Marni handbags for children; minimalist dog beds; Ann Demeuelemeester chairs). She spends her time in Paris hustling from showroom appointment to showroom appointment in a silver chauffeured Mercedes, carefully choosing which pieces from the runway will be stocked on the site. For Chartrand, a fashion show is just the beginning: on long racks at nearly every brand’s showroom space, multitudes of interpretations of the few dozens of looks that appear on the runway are interpreted into other more wearable shapes, alternative colorways and styles. She combs through every single piece — it’s safe to say that in a single season, Chartrand has seen and closely inspected nearly every garment that goes down a runway in Paris, and much of Milan, too. She might just be the most hardcore shopper on the planet.

“I want to trigger a customer — Oh yeah! I hadn’t thought of that,” she says. “It’s about being able to visualize the girl. Who’s that girl, walking down the street wearing this?” Asked to describe the girl more, she says: “It’s all different types of girls. But sometimes, I think that it’s me, in different parts of my life!”

With long silvery hair and bright eyes, Chartrand, who oversees a team of nearly 30 people, is her employer’s best evidence that Ssense is a lifestyle. She spent the 1990s flying back and forth to Antwerp, Belgium, to immerse herself in the fashion scene there, then dominated by designers rewriting the rules of design like Martin Margiela and Raf Simons. Chartrand champions an ethos that rejects the conventions of shopping by department or gender. She’s created a world where a person who wants a Fear of God sweatshirt should be able to get a matching one for their child, and brings the same exacting taste to smokers, bike helmets and dining room chairs.

This year, she celebrates 10 years at Ssense; previously, she ran her own Montreal boutique. Her greatest passion is not shopping but selling: “You feel really great having someone walk into the changing room. Once they’re inside, the playground is open. You just want to keep them in there, having the best time.”

On the day we met, she wore a pair of Manolo Blahnik kitten heel mules in a fusty, ditsy pale blue floral print with a fitted red-orange leather Prada skirt and her partner’s oversize frayed Carhartt jacket.

Armed with reams of data and analytics, Chartrand says she and her team are able to predict with a level of precision how people shop on Ssense and what they’re looking for, down to the number of skirts they’ll sell in a certain style and which sizes. Some customers return daily, she says, recalling meeting a top New York client who “knows that everyday at 5 p.m. the New Arrivals would update. We have people that are committed.” Chartrand and her team are trotting around the globe, including trips to Antwerp and virtual meetings in Tokyo, to help those customers get their fashion fix.

After the Balenciaga show — Ssense carries hundreds of the brand’s pieces — Chartrand began her afternoon at Comme des Garçons’s showroom on the Place Vendome. “I don’t want to think” during a Comme show, she says. “I don’t want to analyze too much.”

She enters the appointment with little idea of what she’ll be able to buy. Unlike most brands, Comme makes none of its runway looks available for retail (though they are available by special order), though Ssense has purchased some of its runway looks for its archive. Instead, they “iterate,” as Chartrand puts it, on the runway themes, distilling them into “more commercial pieces.”

Chartrand’s team typically scouts in advance, and she follows behind. “We go try some shapes,” she says. “We know what categories do really well for us, and then we sprinkle some extravagant pieces in.” She sends runway pictures of her favorite looks to her team — Comme skirts and dresses do very well for them, and “shirts, if they’re a little complex” — and then returns in person to make sure she’s made the right calls.

In the showroom, she’s greeted by James Gilchrist, vice president of Comme des Garçons USA and Dover Street Market USA. The Comme team offers her a model, a statuesque young woman in tights, a leotard and ballet flats, who trots behind Brigitte, twirling her hair.

“I have to see the pieces on,” she explains. “The way they end up falling creates interesting shapes.” After all, Ssense needs to persuade you to spend upward of a thousand dollars on things you can’t touch or try on — the piece has to sell itself on a model.

The writer Hilton Als once observed that Comme designer Rei Kawakubo “does not design clothes but events in which people appear,” a truth that bore out in the showroom. Chartrand reaches under skirts and tops, pulling them out and inspecting their seams like a fashion mechanic, then summons the model. A top that looked like an odd tangle of straps, when pulled over the model’s head and arms, was suddenly a cute little crop top. Another top, a faux leather with a cowl neck that can also be worn as a hood, flopped down unflatteringly in the front. “That did not really work for me,” she says, knitting her brow.

At the end of the long room is a lovely lunch spread of quiches and salads. Buyers speaking German, Italian and Japanese pile their plates high. Six or seven feet above us is a window. Kawakubo sits at a long table, occasionally looking down at us all.

Next, the car whisks us to Simone Rocha, whose late February show in London was inspired by Queen Victoria’s mourning dress, with dresses creased as if pulled from a storage box, egg-shaped gowns and capes, and sheer dresses festooned with faux furs. Models carried a little furry animal bag with a sparkling red eye whose tail wrapped around their forearms. “I can’t wait to see that little poodle,” Chartrand coos in her lilting Quebecois accent as she breezes through the door.

Rocha and her mother, Odette, give Chartrand a big squeeze. “Ssense is one of our best partners,” says Rocha. “What they buy really represents the collection.”

Rocha picks up the animal bag — “it’s inspired by the Grim from English folklore, which is the last thing you see before you die!” — and leads Chartrand personally through the collection. “I love that she does that — it’s really intimate,” says Chartrand. Part of what makes Ssense unique, Chartrand explains, is that their buyers work across all categories, which creates “consistency” in their offerings. Most retailers have one buyer focused on shoes, another on dresses; still others separate the buying process by the cost or target audience of a designer. Instead, Chartrand assigns each member of her team to individual brands, so that the person picking out the Simone Rocha dresses is also picking her jewelry and handbags.

Much of Chartrand’s process is instinct. Like many fashion people, her most fluid language is clothing, not words about clothing. “Certain things feel like they’re us — they have consistency and authenticity,” she explains. “And there are things that, even if they’re really selling for other people, won’t work for us.”

Rocha pulls out of a pair of faux fur long black shorts from a rack of menswear. “These will do really well for us — they are very Ssense!” Chartrand exclaims. Later she expands: “I can see the guy! They’ll also shoot really well. It’s editorial, it’s also easy to wear. Our customer likes anything that’s a bit more extravagant.”

“I wanted to do Dries because it’s a real challenge for a buyer,” Chartrand says as we approach the door of Dries Van Noten’s showroom in the Marais. “It’s all of these patterns, and you have to figure out how to mix them together. You need to take a point of view.”

Ssense doesn’t want you to log on to buy just one thing. Chartrand works with the studio team to help choose the models the site will work with for a month at a time; that team also styles the products. She whips out her phone to show off a piece that just went on the site: a $1,785 Dries Van Noten beige printed caftan dotted with purple paillettes, which the team has styled with a pair of purple and beige swirling gloves, also by Dries Van Noten, and brown heels. What looks like a tragic muumuu on another site has Peggy Guggenheim glamour on Ssense. “The idea is to show the person browsing, you can wear this, and you can wear it like this.”

Inside Dries, the brand’s wholesale director, Luka Primack, greets her and takes her through the two-story space, packed with seemingly endless interpretations of all 67 of the runway looks. He has her entire order — which is enormous, with countless tops, dresses, coats, bombers, pieces of loungewear, long leather gloves, jewelry and multiple handbags — memorized. “The rest of the team was just here!” he says defensively.

She pulls out a green sparkly jacket. “I love this,” she says. “The team is going to be shocked.”

As Primack assures her the right choices were made — “We’re doing the tinsel,” he tells her — she also demands a number of swaps. A big fur jacket is swapped for a little denim version. Orange is preferred over pink — “That’s more the Dries girl,” she says. She prefers a necklace you can twist into different shapes instead of one hung with beads and gems. “You can play with it,” she says, her face serious. “Choose your own adventure.”

As we look through the rack, her photographic memory of fashion shows snaps into action. “Doesn’t this come in camel?” she says of a bulbous quarter zip. She decides on velvet. “It’s elevated.”

She examines a wedge shoe. This appointment takes on an air of urgency — who knows whether it’s the power of Van Noten’s colors or the enthusiasm of the buyer. Probably both. Everything feels vaguely like a military operation — lingo and commands are flying. The wedges, with a convex curve, come in heights of minute difference — 110 millimeters, 95 millimeters, 70. “Here we’re doing the 110,” says her buyer. “I prefer the 95.” “Should we do the 95?” “The 95 is the sweet spot.”

“We need a tall boot,” she says. “We’re doing a tall boot,” the buyer assures her. “It’s just a choice about what height.” Chartrand studies two boots, one with an inch heel, and one twice as tall. “We need more coverage in the 110. I like the 110,” she says. “It’s more believable,” the buyer agrees.

And with that, it’s back upstairs and on to the next stop to find the rest of your fall wardrobe.