Tom Ford-Era Gucci, Carrie Bradshaw’s Fendi, Aaliyah-Worn Alaïa: You Can Rent That

Reported by Vogue.

Archival fashion has been having its moment everywhere — Kendall Jenner in body-contouring '90s Mugler, Hailey Bieber sliding around New York in jewel-tone vintage Gucci — but for most women, those pieces exist behind a velvet rope of celebrity stylists and private collectors. Isle of Monday wants to tear it down.

Founded by Janelle Gray and Gabriella Carota, Isle of Monday is a vintage rental platform built around the archives most of us have only seen on a red carpet or a mood board. According to Vogue, the inventory is genuinely jaw-dropping: Roberto Cavalli runway gowns worn by Aaliyah and Ashanti, an Alaïa mini that once belonged to Naomi Campbell, Carrie Bradshaw's actual Fendi, Galliano-era Dior, Vivienne Westwood corsetry, Anna Sui from Clueless. Rental prices run $65 for a Betsey Johnson up to $1,600 for a Cavalli gown — the same gown that would cost roughly $25,000 to own outright. The math is not subtle.

Democratizing the Archive

Gray's founding instinct came from posting a spring 2003 Cavalli gown she'd sourced for a wedding — the response from friends who immediately wanted to borrow it told her everything. Carota had been running Isle of Monday as a resale Instagram account and hosting New York pop-ups before the two met in 2022 and pivoted to a rental-first model. The logic is straightforward: "Instead of one person owning a piece forever, dozens of women can experience it over time," Gray says. The platform has since dressed Avantika, Alex Cooper, and Gabby Windey, and worked with stylists including Mimi Cuttrell and Kat Typaldos, who sourced a Todd Oldham archive piece for Mary Beth Barone's Golden Globes look through the platform. "I love inheriting some energetic swag or glamour from those who inhabited the piece before you," Typaldos says — which is the most elegant case for vintage rental you'll read all year.

Operations are entirely in-house: authentication, preservation, fit guidance, photography. A 1998 Westwood corset is not treated like a warehouse SKU, and the platform introduced a "Will This Fit?" measurement tool to address vintage's notoriously chaotic sizing. Demand has already spread well beyond New York and LA — Atlanta, Tennessee, Michigan, Kansas — because, as Gray puts it, the Isle of Monday customer isn't saving these pieces for occasion-only dressing. She's wearing a Galliano corset with vintage denim on a Tuesday. The strongest performers right now skew maximalist — Cavalli, Versace, Blumarine, Jean Paul Gaultier — with growing appetite for the quieter, more sensual silhouettes of Tom Ford-era Gucci. Future expansion targets early McQueen, Margiela, Alaïa, and Issey Miyake.

Investor Cassandra Grey, founder of Violet Grey, calls the platform "the answer to a problem every 'main character woman' knows intimately" — and she's not wrong. One beta customer spent months hunting a specific runway dress she'd saved years before, found it on Isle of Monday, and rented it for her 30th birthday. "She told us she genuinely never thought she'd get to wear something like that in her lifetime," Carota says. That's the whole point: fashion history was never meant to sit in a private collection.

Read the original at Vogue.