Sophie Cohen stood in a line down Madison Avenue for over an hour, in the freezing cold, waiting to get into a Chanel store. She wasn’t there for a discount. She wasn’t even guaranteed to get what she came for.
She’d seen the shoes months earlier — a $1,500 pair of pony-hair ballet flats from Matthieu Blazy’s first runway show as Chanel’s new designer. The room gave him a standing ovation. Sophie couldn’t stop thinking about the shoes.
She tried to buy them in Paris. Sold out in her size. So she flew home and waited for the U.S. drop instead. When the doors finally opened, it was chaos — people fighting over pieces, sales associates running the floor. And when she finally got to the shoes, her size was gone.
