Vintage Fashion Part II My first entrepreneurial venture in vintage fashion Part II: getting serious

After that I became more obsessed, studying colors, trends and hemlines of different seasons from the past, the chief designers of the periods. I spotted items I loved in books by Rudi Gernreich, Mainbocher, Molyneux, The House of Worth, Stephen Burrows, Bill Gibb, John Koss, Jeanne Marc, Lucien Lelong, and hunted obsessively for something by them on eBay. As authenticity and correct period are critical to the value of a piece, I began to study the hallmarks of one of the original collections.

One of the most important things to look for is the label. Over the years most fashion houses will use different variations on their clothing label design, updating it to change with the times or to highlight a particular collection with a special label. There's a wonderful website published by the Vintage Fashion Guild called the VFG Label Resource where they have posted photographs of the various labels used by nearly 1,000 designers over the years, identifying which periods these labels came from. I started to reference this site when browsing online and it let me see right away whether an item was authentically vintage or not or whether it was from their best period.

As I have been living in small Manhattan apartments for many years, the clothing collection was starting to get a bit out of hand, using up the hangers in my closet and filling boxes stacked in the corner. I had gone down the road of obsession. I couldn't stop browsing eBay for hours, looking for that one rare piece that others had overlooked, planning my bidding strategy so I wouldn't call attention to how special the piece was and swooping in and sniping it for a fraction of what it was worth. But what was it worth? Vintage clothing is a highly impractical store of value, quite illiquid and dependent upon numerous subjective features as to its value. I didn't want to just sell the clothes back on eBay for the low prices I had paid. I wanted to make money from my specialized knowledge by arbitraging the value of rare pieces that I bought either from people who didn't realize it or who were realistic about what eBay could yield.

I started to call around to the high end vintage fashion boutiques of New York and ask them what designers they buy, what they're looking for, and when I could make an appointment to show them my stuff. It took several contacts in most cases, and they usually asked for me to email them detailed lists and photos of what I had before they would even make an appointment with me. I can understand that. They probably get calls from loads of people who think they have something important, only for it to turn out to be a knockoff or a designer that is no longer "in fashion" for vintage collectors.

At this point, my out of control spending and collecting was starting to alarm me because I wasn't always sure I was doing this to make money or because I had an insatiable appetite for beautiful things. I didn't go into debt, but I spent a lot of money that if I had invested it, well, let's not go there. I don't believe in doing "coulda woulda shoulda." But my uneasiness became a spur to get out there and build relationships with these shops, which I did, bit by bit, and I would go around to one after another with large bags of neatly folded items between tissue paper and I would make anywhere from $200 to $1,000 a month in side income. This was wonderful, but even back then I was wishing that I could quit my job and do this full time. It wasn't to be, but I did slowly unload a large chunk of my collection, keeping photographs to remember pieces by. It culminated when I actually went all out and rented a conference room at the West Side Hilton and had my own Vintage clothing show. I rented industrial garment racks to hang all the items on, put out some limited advertisement, and filled the room with them. It took me hours to write all the labels.

Since I still had hundreds of pieces I was a bit disappointed at the end of the time that I still had hundreds left. But then a wonderful woman named Yana walked in. She was quite artistic looking, wearing a unique vintage skirt suit that I find hard to describe and a severe wedge haircut. There was something a bit severe and Ayn Rand looking about her style, though her face was much prettier. It turned out she had a large boutique on the Lower West Side and was in great need of more inventory. She introduced herself and her husband Jan and said that she was impressed by my eye for items and for specific designers – she had already found many pieces by some of her favorite designers, some of whom are less well known to the public today but were considered geniuses in their time. She told me she usually came to events like this at the end to see if she could make a deal to take the rest of the clothing back to her store and sell it on a revenue share. After we came to terms on the split of the sales, I agreed with immense relief. I had already catalogued all of the items and she gave me a receipt for them and a large cash advance to hold as security. Her husband said he would go get the van. I was still a bit unsure about letting all the inventory go away with her when the advance didn't cover it. Yana sensed my unease and invited me to go with her and Jan to her shop and to see it in person and look at her bookkeeping system. I agreed that after they loaded up the clothes and I cleaned up the last of the items in the room and checked out with the hotel that I would follow them in a cab. We went there and her shop was a treasure trove.

The collection ended up yielding side income for me for several years after this, and of course Yana had solved my storage problem as well! I enjoyed this time very much and I still have a few special pieces that I have saved, but I have moved on to other interests since then.