Skip to main content
My friend and sometime boss, but mostly my friend now after all these years, Kathy Becker, editor of Naples Illustrated magazine, put me to an interesting test of my second hand, vintage clothes finding skills. She wants vintage Oscar de la Renta for a garden party, size 8 on top, size 14 on the bottom. I'm thinking I might just go for the full monty and find the hat and gloves.

I have often said, give me the Yellow Pages and some mild curiosity and I could find Osama bin Laden. AND he'd be wearing vintage de la Renta and LIKING it.

The easiest route would be vintage clothing dealers. It's funny, though about those because they tend to get all precious about them. But they're still just, you know, used clothes. I suppose there's someone out there who can really do crafty-decorate-y things with an old prom dress and a hot glue gun. I ain't that kind of girl. If the sweat stains and dry rotted seams won't let me wear it to the annual polo fundraiser, I don't know what else to do with it.

I do buy cashmere sweaters whenever I find them at thrift stores and cut them up. I have half of one of those recycled sweater quilts and just huge fluffy piles of boiled cashmere (it doesn't really boil well--it stays soft and fluffy no matter how long you boil it--that was interesting to find out). sorted into color groups, but that's as far as I'll go.

Next would be ebay. I'm off!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lost Designer of the 80's

Claude Barthelemy seems to have been one of those if-you-needed-to-ask-you-didn't-need-to-know designers. In the '80's, he was listed as a young, hot couturier alongside go-the-distance blue chips like Karl Lagerfeld and Lanvin with his oversized sweaters, minis, leggings and fur-trimmed stoles. Exclusive stores carried his soft-edged jackets to shoppers in the know. And then what happened? His pleated skirts, intarsia sweaters, and naughty, zippered wool catsuits still fetch high prices in vintage world and any dealer with his elegantly simple, Gallic tag on her racks raises a flutter in second-hand seekers. He designed for Barbie, for heaven's sake! But the designer himself, who seems to have cut a meteoric swath across the runways and then...? So what's the story with this wasp-waisted pleated skirt? I wondered what else this woman could have dropped off on her Goodwill drive-by--a Chanel original? A couture Pucci? Surely someone this linked in wouldn't just ...
2 comments
Read more

Change Your Tone!!

I know I have a "unique voice." But I can count on one hand how many people I know who can stand listening to their own voice. (That is not saying there aren't those guys who seem to love talking just to hear the sound of their own voice; but if you literally  played it back to them --they'd cringe and crawl under the sofa.) When I was in the 3rd grade, I was chosen to be in some experimental speech/voice therapy at our school. They tried for many weeks to raise the pitch of my voice by having me go up and down the do-re-mi scales until I hit one that they thought sounded pleasing. I had a deep, true contralto voice somewhere a few notes below "do." With the sort of rasping, old-chain-smoker undertones of a freckled Billie Holiday. The experimenters settled on "fa." For 20 minutes three times a week, I got to leave Ms. Foster's third grade classroom and go to the convent living room where I would sing "do-re-mi-fa" and say ...
Post a Comment
Read more

G is for Garbage In-Garbage Out--Good Advice for Potential Hoarders

I do try to keep a relative handle on the homeostasis of my inventory and my home work and storage space. I keep things either selling or returning, and I'm trying to buy less actual inventory. But I've lost interest in the back-breaking work that the eBay biz requires and I have hit a patch where I just can't deal with the even limited social interaction with buyers. I try to convince myself I'm buying salvage materials for my new up cycle projects, or that I won't be acquiring any new inventory when I'm up at my farm for the entire summer. All the same, I'm picking up definite vibes that this is an addict's justification and I'm starting to cross the line where the stuff is coming in faster than I can process and get it out again. You actually can't call it "inventory" if it's not actually for sale. It is just "garbage." Part of the hoarding disorder is the supreme discomfort that is caused by getting rid of items....
1 comment
Read more