Daphne Groeneveld & Julia van Os’ Vintage Business Is The Anti-RealReal

When I rolled up to Neighbors on a ho-hum Saturday in April, I expected to run into a few friends from Maaari and Ming Yu Wang, who were both tabling at a pop-up market hosted by the Greenpoint photo studio. What I most definitely did not anticipate was clocking Daphne Groeneveld in a back alcove among racks of Chloé-ish gathered-silk gowns and Yves Saint Laurent polka-dot pumps.

As I would later learn, Groeneveld (whom you might recognize from this flexy meme) was there as a vendor — she and fellow Dutch model Julia van Os co-founded Lost Labels in September 2023 and have been selling hypercurated, mostly designer vintage at a few select New York City shopping events ever since.

“It started from us having our own pieces that were like, ‘We don't wear this, but they're so amazing, and they're just sitting in our closets,” van Os says when we meet a few weeks later at her Brooklyn apartment. “And we thought it was such a shame. We feel like there aren’t many resale platforms that are boutique enough that put emphasis on how special the pieces are. Because I feel like you can resell on a mass platform, like The RealReal, but your piece then gets lost because there are 50 million others there.”

Instead, Lost Labels shoots elevated imagery of their carefully edited inventory on Groeneveld and van Os (who’s also involved at Neighbors, which was founded in part by her photographer husband). It’s a real friends-and-family operation, say the duo, who hit it off backstage at a Tom Ford show. Groeneveld puts together mood boards and concepts, van Os builds the e-comm platform, and even the name came about over lunch, during which they tossed out options until one stuck. “See? That’s why it’s called Lost Labels,” Groeneveld says as she lifts the half-affixed tag on a sheer MaxMara dress with a rosette on the cowl neck.

The co-founders have assembled a rack of collector’s items and more wearable treasures that they’ve sourced from their own archives and travels — there’s a “beautiful vintage store” in A Coruña they always visit, Groeneveld says — as well as choice finds from other sellers. An asymmetrical pink Moschino hangs alongside a burnout python Roberto Cavalli top and a Fendi leather jacket with Rothko stripes. Below, the shoes: vertiginous, brogue-perforated Marc Jacobs samples worn only once on the runway by Groeneveld and a pair of rare robin’s-egg blue Gucci horsebit loafers in a dainty size 36.5. A top-handle Gucci by Tom Ford bag Groeneveld picked up in Paris rests on a nearby table. (“If it doesn’t sell, I’ll keep it,” she says.)

There’s loads more where that came from, they say — enough to fill the showroom they’re looking for, and later, a proper storefront they might eventually bring to Europe. But for now, they’re making it happen on their own, handling LLCs and trademarks, responding to stylists reaching out for shoot loans, combing the internet for van Os’ Holy Grail (Phoebe Philo-era Céline), and bagging up prom dresses for young customers, like they did at the Neighbors event. It amounts to many extra hours, daily, on top of their main gigs as models. But “it’s what we love to do,” van Os says, “so it definitely doesn’t always feel like work.”