What it's like to lose your pants at the Rachel Comey sample sale

Don't worry, there's a happy ending!

Once or twice a year, the St. Patrick’s Youth Center on Mulberry Street turns into a massive fitting room for the Rachel Comey sample sale. It is my Super Bowl, and one of the few things I wait in line for. It’s common for people to start queueing up outside early in the morning before the doors even open. I am one of those sickos, usually within the first 10 people in line (I’m bragging but also owning myself). When I showed up over an hour before the sale started this week, there were already 15-20 people waiting.

The inside of the gym was filled with racks of clothes, shoes and bags. There seemed to be more inventory than usual, which would make sense since the last IRL sale was in 2019. The event was…invigorating?? I felt ALIVE. We’ll get into what I bought later, but we’re really here to talk about some funny stories bubbling up in group chats about the sale. By Friday evening, I’d heard of three separate women who lost the clothes they walked in wearing while trying stuff on.

The first instance came from my friend Joanna, whose sister was at the sale on Thursday and had seen a woman looking for the dress she came in wearing. It disappeared while she was trying on other clothing. If it was a Rachel Comey dress, could it have possibly been purchased by whoever accidentally snagged it thinking it was a sale item? The dress wasn’t found, and according to Joanna’s sister, the woman bought another dress to wear home.

I’ll set the scene for those of you who haven’t experienced this sale. It’s kind of dark and weirdly quiet with a hint of sweaty. Most people are focused on thumbing through the racks and everyone is generally respectful and mindful as they move through the tight spaces. There are a few mirrors scattered throughout the gym and what seems like 100 or so shoppers in the room at a time, many of whom strip down to try on a dress the moment they take it off the rack. This try-on-while-you-shop situation happens a lot at sample sales, but it’s definitely amplified at the Rachel Comey sale. It was in one of these chaotic try-on moments that Katherine Lewin, owner of Big Night in Greenpoint, lost her pants.

I reached out to Katherine on Instagram, and she kindly agreed to talk to me about her very funny experience, which she referred to as “a wonderfully iconic NYC moment that I have only positive feelings about!”

Don’t worry, folks, we’ve got a happy ending! This interview has been edited for length and clarity and to add links to very good jeans :)

VD: Which day did you go to the sample sale?
KL: I went on Friday morning around 11am.

Roughly where in the gym did you decide to start trying on clothes? Tell me about what you tried on. 
I decided to plant my stake in the try-on ground towards the back of the gym, by the Tops rack. It felt a bit less crowded/in the center of the action than, say, the jumpsuits area. 

At what point did you realize your pants were missing?
As I was trying on garment 3 of maybe 15 in my bag -- a technicolored floral dress that looked like a 90s one-piece with a skirt attached, by which I mean, peak Rachel Comey -- I looked down at my little pile of items on the ground (phone, shoes, socks, jeans -- they check your coat and bag up front so I really had very few personal items on me) and realized...my jeans were gone. My shoes, socks, and phone were still there -- but my beloved Rudy Judes, which at this point basically have my butt imprinted into them, had disappeared. I looked all around the floor nearby, but it was immediately clear that they had definitely been scooped up.

What did the sale staff do?
The first thing I did was look for a uniformed crew member -- and by that I mean someone with a lanyard -- because I assumed from the jump that my jeans had been mistaken for RC jeans that needed to be re-hung on the rack. There are lots of staff working the sample sale, and I could see they were doing a really good job of constantly sweeping up all the clothes that had fallen to the floor as people tried on. When I started telling staff members what had happened, they did not seem surprised. One person advised that I should "check the denim rack every 15 minutes or so." Then I found a woman who seemed to be in a management position, and she was very kind and reassuring and soothing, and let me know that while this does unfortunately happen, she was sure they'd be able to find the pants. About 20 minutes later, when my jeans had not turned up, her tune did change slightly and she told me that they'd give me a pair of RC pants to wear home and would keep looking. But I was not going to leave without my jeans! (Skipping to the end of this story -- as I was picking up my stuff at the coat/bag check, I heard a guest who had just walked in ask if she could keep her coat with her. The staff member she was speaking to advised her to check whatever she could because "it's crazy up there" and you just don't know what's going to happen. I, of course, echoed her sentiment and told her to leave her coat.) 

Did the shoppers around you help?
None of my fellow shoppers helped (I was there alone), BUT I did get plenty of sympathetic eye contact. Honestly, it made me feel better and less alone in my pantsless-ness. 

Where were your pants eventually found? Who found them?
After stalking the denim rack for what felt like an eternity (but I think was about an hour after initially losing them), I finally found them in a sea of hundreds and hundreds of Rachel Comey pairs. They blended right in with everything that was actually for sale. If I hadn't been looking through the denim rack, one pair at a time, I don't think I ever would have found them. 

[Ed note: Again, these are the jeans. I’m keeping this tab open because I think I NEED them in white :)]

Lastly, this IS a shopping newsletter. Tell me what you bought!
Obviously once I found my own jeans I was euphoric, which put me in a much better mood/headspace to actually shop (which, as it turns out, is impossible to do when you're considering what it will feel like to walk down Mulberry street without the jeans you wore out of the house that morning). I ended up buying a two-color tie-dye jumpsuit, a red silk skirt, a pair of white sandal heels, and three pairs of earrings. 

If you work at Rachel Comey and want to talk about what it’s like to organize this sale, please reach out: buybitch@substack.com.