San Francisco has always had a complicated relationship with fashion. The city values authenticity over trend-chasing, and its most interesting style figures tend to approach their wardrobes the way they approach their civic lives: with conviction, without performance.
Vanessa Getty has been on Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed List. She has also been coordinating free spay-neuter services in shopping center parking lots in Hunters Point. For her, those aren’t facts from separate lives. They’re part of the same infrastructure.
The PURR Sale was the clearest expression of that integration. Created in 2008 to fund the Peninsula Humane Society’s mobile veterinary program, the event was built on a simple premise: Getty’s fashion network—her relationships with designers, brand executives, and socially connected women with extraordinary closets—was an asset. The question was how to deploy it.
Her answer was a luxury resale event unlike anything San Francisco had seen at the time. Donations came from across the fashion world: Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo, Judith Leiber, and Oscar de la Renta, alongside Nicole Kidman and a wide network of San Francisco’s fashion-adjacent community. Everything was priced to move—30 to 70 percent below retail—with 100 percent of proceeds going directly to the mobile clinic.
The design philosophy was deliberate. Getty wanted guests to feel like buyers, not donors. The generosity had already happened at the donation stage. By the time someone arrived at the sale, they were there to shop—and the prices were good enough that shopping required no guilt and no persuasion. A $17,000 Ralph Lauren handbag listed for $12,000. A designer dress that retailed for $1,000 sold for $275.
The first event raised approximately $150,000 in an hour. The second, in 2015, with an expanded network and more than 100 guests in a private Pacific Heights home, raised $350,000.
That money funded free veterinary care for Bay Area communities where a $400 spay or neuter surgery was cost-prohibitive. The mobile clinic drove to neighborhoods across the region, providing surgeries and vaccinations to pet owners who had no other affordable option.
The connection between fashion and that outcome is not coincidental. Getty had spent years building relationships in the fashion world—genuine ones, developed over decades of real presence in that community. PURR was what happened when she turned those relationships toward a problem she cared about solving. The model matched what people were actually willing to do with outcomes that actually mattered.
More than 9,500 free surgeries later, the mobile clinic those events helped fund is still running. Fashion built the infrastructure. Animal welfare is the outcome.