The dirty little secret about mania-inducing tentpole sales—your Cyber Mondays, your Fourths of July, and yes, [*shudders*] your Amazon Prime Days—is that they’re often most valuable for stocking up on the things you need, as opposed to scoring the ones you want. A dozen pairs of sport socks for $18? Sure, toss ‘em in the cart. Ten boxy black T-shirts for $24? Hell, why not. How about a sensible white dress shirt for just $29? Don’t mind if I do!
But while all those deals are solid and practical and big on value, they’re not exactly anyone’s idea of sexy. They don’t elicit the same pulse-quickening, clout-boosting thrill of discovering a rare designer grail in just your size on the clearance rack in the dusty back room of some store you stumbled into on a whim. For that kind of action—for the real crate-digging, big-game-hunting experience that all true shopping fiends crave—you need to turn to Mr Porter.
You see, the luxury menswear hub’s Cyber Monday sale runs more than 7,000 items deep, with discounts up to 50% off on the types of labels that make GQ editors go full heart_thumping_out_of_chest.gif. There’s advanced Japanese sportswear (Needles, Wacko Maria), breakout European runway stars (Nicholas Daley, Jacquemus), age-old Parisian houses (Lanvin, Balenciaga), true-blue American streetwear (Stussy, Noah), and every other possible permutation of brand-you’ve-read-about-in-this-magazine imaginable. Only problem? By the time this stuff hits Mr Porter’s sale section, it tends to be pretty well sold through. You might be ecstatic one moment to find the clementine cashmere Raf Simons topcoat of your dreams for a cool $3,800 off…and then crumble in defeat the next when you realize there’s only one left and it’s four sizes too small.
That’s all part of the fun, though: scrolling through page after carpal-tunnel-flaring page of dredges, duds, and misdirects, until finally, finally unearthing an utterly wild, definitively elite steal that will elevate your fit pics for years and years to come. Maybe that moment will never actually arrive for you—them’s the risks of high-end grail-seeking—but if and when it does, rest assured it will deliver the type of pure, adrenaline-fueled, consumerist relief that copping a six-pack of Hanes tanks from Target could never even hope to sniff.
