Interview with Britney Market's Juliette Darkwings
interview and photos by zara nneka
Zara: Would you introduce yourself to our readers?
Juliette: Hi! My name is Juliette, I’m 27 years old and I come from the west coast of France. I have been in Paris for 7 years now, and I’ve been running Britney Market for one year.
Zara: How did you come to create Britney Market?
Juliette: When I was in high school, I was already selling my own clothes and I was making a lot of money from that. So I understood how selling clothes worked and started to look for vintage clothes to sell, and my friends asked me to source clothes for them. When I finished school, I started a shop online where I sold my clothes - it’s called Dark Sisters, mostly Y2K, gothic & dark stuff. When COVID came, I had to sell all my clothes online exclusively, and when COVID stopped, I started going to a lot of vintage markets to sell. I discovered that all the markets were quite retro - very 80s, old-fashioned. The aesthetic of my shop wasn’t working, and I asked my clients why they didn’t come to the market where I was selling, they told me, “This is too old-fashioned, you’re the only one selling Y2K, we’re not going to cross Paris just for you, it’s not enough”. So I thought OK, maybe we need an exclusively Y2K market, but it didn’t exist. It didn’t exist anywhere in the world - I tried to look globally if there was even one market and I didn’t find one. So I decided to start one, but it was kind of stressful for me because I had never done any event by myself. At the first Britney Market, there were really a lot of people. Everybody was talking about it, it became so big. At the 7th or 8th Britney Market, it became really crazy, almost like a machine. At some moments, I became very stressed because it became bigger than I could handle and I didn’t know how I could manage it, so I had to start a real company. Today I’m a CEO! I never went to business school, I didn’t know how to run a big business, I had to learn everything on my own, so it was very stressful and it’s still very stressful.
Zara: I assume you think social media is an indispensable tool for you to promote the market?
Juliette: Honestly, yes. It began spreading by word of mouth, but then it continued and I wanted to expand outside Paris, so I had to do a lot of advertising through Instagram. For a month now I’ve started advertising on TikTok, so that’s new, I just pay for the ads and I didn’t do that before. When I pay for advertising on social media, the following, the likes, people from around the world engage with the market. I actually just saw that there’s a market in the U.S. that copied us - they didn’t credit us at all. It’s kind of flattering, but at the same time that is my work, and I worked a lot for this.
Zara: Speaking of TikTok, it’s safe to say that we live in an age of microtrends - Y2K revival was a very popular one during COVID and continues to be. Why do you think Y2K stands out and has lingered compared to other trends on social media?
Juliette: Because Y2K is not a microtrend. It is a big trend, and it’s a huge subculture. There are many ways of wearing clothes, many ways of listening to music, different attitudes. It works because it’s about freedom and how people can express themselves. We take it more seriously now - we can take the sexy clothes of Y2K and the empowerment that they may have not had 20 years ago, and now we have it. We wear the same clothes, but with a different attitude and a different mindset.
Zara: One of the best things about Britney Market is that it’s free to attend. It’s an accessible, free, fun and safe space. What are the logistics like behind the scenes when it comes to having vintage sellers come and set up their shops?
Juliette: The sellers pay to be here. I don’t take commission on what they sell. The prices can be kind of ridiculous between what they pay to be here and what they make, but they all know that. It’s the business!
Zara: What would you say is the biggest obstacle when it comes to organizing a market like this?
Juliette: When the market started to get bigger, the event spaces we rent usually started asking for more money. I’m a company, and France is really one of the worst countries for tax. Money comes out of my office every month just to organize it. It’s starting to get hard for me because these spaces think I’m a very rich person and this is not the case. Sometimes there can be smaller problems, like a DJ gets sick the day of the event, it happens. But I guess the biggest problem is the money people think I have. I mean, we’ve only been around for one year! We’re a baby company, but people think we’re a huge company and we have a lot of money.
Zara: Britney Market is obviously well-known in Paris and other cities in France, and recently there was an edition in Amsterdam. Are there any other countries you want to expand to?
Juliette: Yes! I want to go to Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Zara: I can see something like Britney Market being huge in London.
Juliette: They’ve got it already! There are incredible shops like Michelle Tamar… The U.K. is great with Y2K. There’s Camden and other places like it that we don’t have here in France. I also really love Germany. In Berlin, there’s a little Y2K market that just started a few months ago. But they don’t copy us, they do their own thing and I really like it. They even asked for a collaboration, but I don’t want to do it - I don’t think two markets can work together.
Zara: It just isn’t the same as an artistic collaboration.
Juliette: Yeah, it’s honestly a competition. Not everyone is in the same boat - it’s a game that I love, and I want to play fair. If there are other Y2K markets, I’m happy because it means it gives me a challenge. So I’m really happy with the competition around me - but I want fair competition. Don’t copy me, don’t copy my visuals or my aesthetic. Like come on - there’s a lot within Y2K. There’s a rap & urban side, the super glitter-Britney side, goth & emo, cyber… there are many ways of doing a market in the Y2K world, so people have to be creative for sure.
Zara: Do you have any tips for people who would like to build their own projects like this - not just within the realm of vintage fashion, but in any other industry or creative pursuit?
Juliette: To always listen to themselves and not to others. To do what they feel is right. They need to observe the world around them, and see what people need. When you want to do a project, there will always be people who say things like, “Oh, that’s too difficult, you can’t do that”. Listen to your heart and look at the world around you and what the world needs, and what you can do to help. They shouldn’t think too much about the money, the likes, the Instagram followers - honestly that’s all bullshit. If you start doing projects for that, it’s not gonna work. It will come easy if you follow your heart and people will come to you and love what you do - and you have to do it honestly.
This interview has been condensed for clarity.