The 5 Vintage Clothing Shop You Can’t Miss in Paris
Paris keeps its second-hand trade in two very different registers. There is the museum-piece end — the
archive dealers off Avenue Montaigne who file couture by house and year — and there is the friperie: the
rail-packed, dig-through-it, come-back-Thursday-when-the-new-batch-lands kind of shop the French have a
specific word for. The friperies cluster, and they cluster tightly: the streets around Montorgueil in the
2nd arrondissement — Rue Saint-Denis, Rue Tiquetonne, Rue de Turbigo — hold a run of them within a few
hundred metres of one another, with the Marais forming the second pole across the river-side of the Right
Bank. We went through every vintage clothing shop with a Google Business listing across the city, 60 of
them, and weighted each rating against how many people actually left one, because a perfect 5.0 from five
hundred reviews and a 4.2 from nearly nine hundred are not making the same claim at all. Five came out
ahead, and between them they cover the full range of what “vintage” means here: a high-volume Parisian
friperie, a small shop with an unbroken perfect score, a budget rail on Rue Saint-Denis, a sustainability-led
European chain, and a curated Marais boutique that behaves more like a project than a store.
ALATONE – Friperie Paris, 2nd arrondissement
The heavyweight on this list, and not by a small margin: ALATONE holds
4.9★ from 1,845 Google reviews, more than triple the review count of anything else here, which for a
single-room friperie is an unusual amount of foot traffic to have converted into ratings. Its own site
(alatone.fr) is close to silent — it gives the name, “Alatone – Fripes Selection,” and very little else, so
what the shop is claiming for itself is the word selection and nothing more elaborate. That reticence
tracks with how the place actually works: it is a sorting-and-selling operation on Rue de Turbigo, a minute
from Étienne Marcel, and the queue outside on a Saturday is the marketing. It keeps the shortest hours of the
five, 11:00 AM to 7:30 PM, but it keeps them every day of the week including Sunday.
BAM’s Vintage, Rue Tiquetonne
The only shop on this list with a clean sheet. BAM’s Vintage carries a
straight 5.0★ across 513 reviews — a perfect average maintained over five hundred separate opinions,
which is rarer than a high average on a thin base and says something specific about how consistent the
experience is. It sits at 7 Rue Tiquetonne, a few doors from Episode further down the same street, so the
two make an obvious back-to-back stop. Its entire web presence is an Instagram account rather than a shop
site, which is standard for the smaller Paris friperies and tells you the stock turns over faster than any
catalogue could keep up with: what is on the rail is what there is. Open daily, 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM, and it
lists a phone number — 06 95 05 42 01 — which not all of its neighbours do.
Cheap Frip Vintage, Rue Saint-Denis
Cheap Frip Vintage puts its positioning in its name, which in a city where
“vintage” is often a synonym for a three-figure price tag is a useful thing to do out loud. It is the
budget-facing end of this list: frip, from friperie, and cheap, in plain English, at 128
Rue Saint-Denis — the long shopping spine that runs north from Châtelet-Les Halles up through the 2nd.
4.7★ from 520 reviews, which is a strong score for a volume shop, where the failure mode is usually a
rail of things nobody sorted. Like BAM’s, it runs on Instagram rather than a website. Open 11:00 AM to
8:00 PM Monday through Saturday, and 11:30 AM to 8:00 PM on Sunday — a half-hour lie-in, and the latest
Sunday opening of the group.
Episode, Rue Tiquetonne
The outlier, in the sense that it is not really a Paris shop at all — Episode
is a European second-hand chain with stores across the Netherlands and Belgium, in Copenhagen and Antwerp,
two in Brussels and one planned for Oslo, and this Rue Tiquetonne address is its Paris presence. The contact
number on its listing is a Dutch one, which fits. What that scale buys is a process rather than a rummage:
the company describes a pipeline where every garment is assessed for quality and style, professionally
repaired if it needs it, washed and then inspected again before it reaches the floor, with the washing done
on “sophisticated machines with a green label” and heat from electric boilers running off its own solar
panels. It also caps how much of any one item a single customer can buy — “we cannot sell more than two
items of the same product” — explicitly to stop bulk resellers stripping the rails before ordinary
customers see them. Its 4.2★ from 895 reviews is the lowest average here and the second-largest review
base, which is the usual shape for a chain: more people through the door, more of them with opinions, less
of the small-shop halo. It is also the only one of the five that closes on Sunday.
Le Pop Up Parisien, Le Marais
The one that has left the 2nd arrondissement cluster entirely, and the one behaving least like a
shop. Le Pop Up Parisien sits at 17 Rue Ferdinand Duval in the Marais and
describes what it does as “une sélection exclusive vintage au cœur de Paris” — a curated selection rather
than a volume rail. The rest of its public footprint reads like a small cultural project: a Vinted storefront
for selling online, a link out to the clothing label NEMOZENA, and a collaborative DJ playlist with Malo
Bertrand under the title “La dose de groove.” That is an unusual mix for a clothing shop and it is the whole
point of the place — the buying is curated, and so is everything around it. 4.9★ from 428 reviews,
the smallest review base on this list and the joint-highest average, open daily 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM.
All five, on the map
The interactive map has all 60 vintage clothing shops we found across Paris,
these five marked and numbered, and a button that hands the walking route between them straight to Google
Maps on your phone.
Getting the most out of a vintage crawl in Paris
Four of these five sit inside a few hundred metres of each other in the 2nd — ALATONE, BAM’s, Episode and
Cheap Frip are genuinely a single loop on foot, done in an afternoon without touching the Métro — and only
Le Pop Up Parisien in the Marais needs a walk, about fifteen minutes east. That makes the practical questions
small ones. A local eSIM from Airalo means maps, opening hours and the
shops’ Instagram feeds all work from the moment you land rather than after you find café Wi-Fi, which matters
more here than usual, because for two of these five Instagram is the shop’s website. Getting in from
CDG or Orly with a suitcase before any of this starts is the other fixed cost — a booked transfer from
Welcome Pickups removes the taxi-queue lottery. Second-hand shops in
Paris are card-friendly but small-ticket, and a day of small purchases is exactly where foreign transaction
fees quietly add up: a Wise or Revolut card
handles euros at the real rate, and both give you a spending record you can actually reconcile afterwards. If
the crawl is one afternoon inside a longer trip, Tiqets covers
skip-the-line entry for the museums between neighbourhoods — the Marais leg drops you within reach of
several. And if you plan to ask about sizing, fabric or whether something has been repaired, a handful of
lessons on Preply buys more in a friperie than in almost any other kind of
shop, since none of this stock comes with a label that answers the question for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the best vintage clothing shop in Paris?
By rating weighted against review volume, ALATONE on Rue de Turbigo comes out clearly on top: 4.9★
from 1,845 reviews, a base more than three times larger than anything else on this list. BAM’s Vintage on Rue
Tiquetonne holds a perfect 5.0★, but across 513 reviews rather than nearly two thousand. “Best” depends
on which you weight — ALATONE for a score that has survived real volume, BAM’s for a record with no blemish
on it at all.
Which part of Paris has the most vintage shops?
The 2nd arrondissement, decisively. Four of the five shops here — ALATONE, BAM’s Vintage, Episode and
Cheap Frip Vintage — sit within a few hundred metres of each other around Montorgueil, Rue Tiquetonne and
Rue Saint-Denis. The Marais, in the 4th, is the second concentration, and it is where Le Pop Up Parisien
sits.
Are Paris vintage shops open on Sundays?
Four of these five are: ALATONE, BAM’s Vintage, Cheap Frip Vintage and Le Pop Up Parisien all list Sunday
hours in Google’s current data, with Cheap Frip opening half an hour later at 11:30 AM. Episode is the
exception and is closed on Sunday. That is unusual for Paris generally, where Sunday closing is still the
default in much of the city — the vintage streets of the 2nd and the Marais are among the areas that trade
through it.
Can you walk between all five in one day?
Yes, comfortably. The four in the 2nd are effectively neighbours — Episode and BAM’s are on the same
street — and the Marais stop is roughly a fifteen-minute walk east, no transit needed. The binding
constraint is not distance but hours: ALATONE closes earliest at 7:30 PM, so it is the one to start with
rather than leave until last.
Is vintage in Paris expensive?
It varies enormously, and none of these shops publishes prices, so treat any figure you read online with
caution. What the listings do tell you is positioning: Cheap Frip Vintage says where it sits in its own name,
Episode runs a chain’s curated-and-repaired model with a two-of-any-item purchase cap, and Le Pop Up Parisien
describes itself as an exclusive selection rather than a rail. Those three sentences describe three quite
different price brackets.
- 1. ALATONE – Friperie Paris — 15 R. de Turbigo, 75002 Paris
- 2. BAM’s Vintage — 7 Rue Tiquetonne, 75002 Paris
- 3. Cheap Frip Vintage — 128 Rue St Denis, 75002 Paris
- 4. Episode — 12-16 Rue Tiquetonne, 75002 Paris
- 5. Le Pop Up Parisien — 17 Rue Ferdinand Duval, 75004 Paris