What it’s actually like
Fifth Avenue has sold luxury to winter visitors since the 1950s, but never quite like this. Vintage by Misty at 7050 East Fifth Avenue is a luxury resale archive that two of the world’s most-read fashion magazines have ranked among the best vintage stores anywhere, and it looks the part: a boutique-scale room where the racks run alphabetically through the great houses from Alaïa to Zandra Rhodes, with Chanel, Gucci, Hermès, Missoni, Pucci and Saint Laurent forming the spine. Bags on shelves, scarves in cases, a jewelry counter, and the particular hush of a place where every piece has been through a checklist.
That checklist is the point. Every Chanel bag, Hermès scarf and Cartier bracelet is expert-verified before it reaches the floor, which is why celebrity stylists source from a shop on a Scottsdale side street and why the prices are what they are. Buying vintage luxury online is a gamble; buying it here is not.
Misty Guerriero came to fashion sideways. An interior curator, she opened a design store in 2005 and started flying to Paris to buy furniture. The clothes she came home with alongside the chairs became a collection, then a problem of space, and in 2009 a boutique of their own. The interior-design eye is still visible in how the room is put together. The shop is appointment-focused and asks that you text for the day’s hours, which is less a barrier than a filter: the people who text are the people the shop wants to dress.
What to buy
A verified Chanel bag. The signature purchase, authenticated before it went on the shelf, and the reason the shop’s reputation reaches far beyond Arizona.
An Hermès scarf. The most portable piece of the archive and the most reliable gift, verified like the bags.
Pucci or Missoni. The Italian prints are the Scottsdale pieces, made for exactly the resort-patio life the city sells, and the shop stocks them in depth.
Something from the A-to-Z rail you did not expect. Alaïa, Saint Laurent, Zandra Rhodes; the pieces stylists pull are the ones nobody else in Arizona has.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop sits toward the western end of the Fifth Avenue curve. The free public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal is the closest reliable parking; the Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a longer, flat walk. The Old Town on foot note maps the route, the Fifth Avenue guide covers the street and the Downtown & 5th Ave guide covers the district.
Text first. The shop is appointment-focused and its hours vary by day, so a message ahead is the difference between a fitting and a locked door. High season from January through April is when the archive is busiest, with the gala and auction calendar, from Arizona Car Week in January onward, driving demand for special-occasion pieces, and Scottsdale Fashion Week drawing the stylists. Summer is the quiet time, and the best time for a long appointment with a serious pull from the back.
For a full vintage day in Old Town, pair it with Fashion by Robert Black, the couture archive in the White Hogan building on First Avenue a few blocks south, and with the Antique Trove if the taste runs to furniture as well.
Eat while you’re there
Berdena’s in Craftsman Court is the coffee before the appointment. FnB, in the same 1955 lane, is the dinner that matches the shopping, the most decorated restaurant in Arizona. Citizen Public House on Fifth is the lunch, and Cartel Roasting Co. at the end of the street is the second coffee once the bag is bought.
How it got here
The shop began as furniture. Misty Guerriero was an interior curator when she opened a design store in 2005, in the last boom years of the 2000s, when Scottsdale’s second-home market was furnishing houses at a pace the city had never seen. Her buying trips took her to Paris, and Paris did what it does to people with an eye: the chairs and lamps came home with vintage clothing packed around them. The clothes were a habit before they were a business, a collection before they were stock. By 2009 they needed a room of their own, and Vintage by Misty opened as a boutique for the fashion finds.
The timing looked terrible and turned out to be ideal. The recession that hit as the shop opened put luxury on hold across the Valley, but it also created the customer that vintage resale depends on: the woman who still wanted Chanel and no longer wanted to pay for it new, and the woman who needed to sell hers. A verified secondary market for luxury was suddenly a service rather than a novelty, and a shop that guaranteed the authenticity of every Chanel bag, Hermès scarf and Cartier bracelet before it reached the floor had an argument the online marketplaces could not make.
Through the 2010s that argument carried further than Fifth Avenue. Vogue and GQ named Vintage by Misty among the top vintage stores in the world, an extraordinary thing to say about a boutique on a resort-town side street, and celebrity stylists began sourcing from it for red carpets and shoots. The archive deepened to match: designers A to Z, from Alaïa to Zandra Rhodes, with Chanel, Gucci, Hermès, Missoni, Pucci and Saint Laurent at the center. The appointment-focused model followed naturally. A shop that stylists fly in for is not a shop that needs to be open to foot traffic all day, and texting for hours became the way in.
It is, in a sense, the Fifth Avenue idea taken to its conclusion. The street was laid out in the 1950s to sell luxury to visitors with winter homes and time to shop, and the Kiva Craft Center on the same curve put Scottsdale design in Vogue sixty years before Misty’s archive did. That a shop on the same avenue now sells the world’s great houses back to the world, verified and pulled to order, is the street doing what it was built for, with better provenance.