The next time someone asks ChatGPT to find them a designer handbag, the answer could be a previously owned version, even if they weren’t originally looking to shop secondhand.
Rémi Bouchez, who was appointed as Vestiaire Collective’s new CTO in March, says the resale platform is working to make its product listing available to OpenAI’s broader agentic shopping systems, which would allow secondhand pieces to appear alongside new products in AI-generated recommendations. The proposed plan follows Vestiaire Collective quietly launching a dedicated app plugin within ChatGPT last month, allowing shoppers to search its pre-owned luxury inventory and compare products using conversational prompts within the chatbot. A shopper searching for a new Prada bag could now conceivably be shown a pre-owned version at a fraction of the price, or an archival design that is no longer available firsthand.
At a time when luxury consumers are questioning rising prices, this could significantly impact the shopping journey. And this is just one part of a wider transformation in how secondhand fashion is discovered. Resale platforms are simultaneously rebuilding their own search and recommendation algorithms, using AI to understand product images, interpret shoppers’ tastes and determine which listings get seen. As a result, the rules of discovery are changing on two fronts: within resale marketplaces themselves, and through the AI assistants that could increasingly direct shoppers towards them.
Bouchez believes that if AI agents like Muse, Instinct and Duet reach mainstream adoption, it could fundamentally change how luxury shoppers weigh up their options.
“These agents are capable of ingesting a ton of information — way more than human shoppers can. They remember user preferences over time, and they can catch things like discreet terms and conditions or shady seller behaviors and put them in front of a user who would have otherwise missed them,” says Bouchez. He explains how an AI agent could compare a Prada bag across several platforms, assessing its condition, authentication details and seller reliability before recommending the best value option, raising the stakes for resellers.
It’s an opportunity resale platforms have long been waiting for. Finding a particular product secondhand has traditionally meant scrolling through multiple marketplace apps, deciphering inconsistent descriptions and comparing endless individual listings. AI now promises to take much of the legwork out of that hunt.
Across the resale industry, rival platforms are investing in both forms of discovery. Depop has enabled shoppers to search its marketplace through Apple’s Visual Intelligence on supported iPhones. Last month, The RealReal introduced its own AI shopping assistant, Ask TRR, built on Google Gemini AI that enables shoppers to search in natural language — or by uploading images of products they’ve seen for visual search — while learning shoppers’ preferences. Speaking on the company’s third-quarter earnings call last week, CEO Rati Levesque said Ask TRR’s early adopters spend 20% more per transaction than non-users. The RealReal is also preparing for shopping journeys that begin outside its own platform. A spokesperson tells Vogue Business the company is restructuring data on its 1.5 million listed items to make them easier for external AI agents to find and recommend.
