USPS Publication Number 16300
T h i s C om mu n it y Ne w s p a p e r i s a p u bl i c a t ion of E s c a m b i a-S a nt a Ro s a B a r A s s o c i a t ion
Se r v i ng t he Fi r st Jud icia l Ci rcu it Section A, Page 1
Vol. 21, No. 35
V isit T he S ummation W eekly O nline : SummationWeekly.com
September 1, 2021
1 Section, 10 Pages
THE NEW VINTAGE C U R ATI NG NOSTALGIC COLLE CTIO N S
by Dakota Parks | Photos by Guy Stevens
F
ashion trends often rotate with the seasons and come in and out of style like clockwork. Mom jeans, bell bottoms, chunky sneakers, bucket hats, hair scrunchies and even neon windbreaker jackets are all back in style. If you ask a vintage collector, however, vintage never goes out of style these days. As consumers learn more about the consequences that industrial fast fashion has on our planet, from the 2,700 gallons of water it takes to produce one cotton t-shirt to the average garment only being worn three to seven times before hitting the landfill, sustainability is a leading reason to shop vintage.
The local vintage scene in Pensacola is sprawling, from the colloquial “antique alley” on Navy Boulevard to pop up vintage markets all over downtown Pensacola. While vintage collectors are constantly tracking down new thrift stores, clothing exchanges, garage sales, estate sales and hidden gems they will take to their hoarder-esque graves, most of their business now happens on Instagram. The new vintage scene is influenced by 90s clothing now classified as vintage. Fueled by online shopping and social media, it is constantly driven towards nostalgia, giving clothing, furniture and home goods a second chance at life. Downtown Crowd spoke to some of the veteran vintage shops in Pensacola to learn more about their styles, niches and vintage hoards. Saturn Collection Like a true vintage clothing connoisseur, Van Smith, 34, recalls that her itch for vintage came from adolescence when she needed an outfit for a hippie-themed middle school dance and her sister took her to the now closed store, Years A Go-Go, to buy some bell bottom pants and a tie dye shirt. From that moment on, she was hooked and began to frequent that same vintage shop and gravitate toward late 60s and early 70s psychedelic hippie and disco-era clothing. Smith has always had an eccentric clothing taste, and the clothing she sells is filled with bright colors, funky
patterns and plenty of vintage accessories to complete any look. Her business, Saturn Collection, previously had a storefront located inside Miles Antique Mall for four years before Hurricane Sally destroyed the building. Now she primarily sells online on Etsy and offers local pickup from her porch. “I am drawn towards the particular patterns that came out during the 10-year period from 1963 to 1973,” she explained. “I’ve been doing this long enough that I can actually tell the difference between a floral pattern from the 2000s and a floral pattern from the 1960s. I don’t have to physically flip through every shirt on the rack anymore. I can just slowly walk down the aisle and look at that sliver of fabric that is in between every single blouse and pull out the vintage material with my eyes.” Saturn Collection sells everything from vintage denim shorts, leather jackets, 50s and 60s era velvet dresses, to disco jumpsuits, floral and psychedelic pattern dresses and 90s band tees and pins. Van Smith also runs the Pensacola Vintage Collective with Ryan Smith, owner of Obsolete Heat. Together they help coordinate and host vintage clothing markets in Pensacola to provide locals with a diverse selection of vintage clothing all under one roof. Their next market is on October 9 at Odd Colony. “I think I’m a bit of a vintage purist in the sense that I don’t want to walk into a mall and purchase a
Supertouch Vintage
Saturn Collection pair of bell bottom jeans off a rack,” she explained. “I would rather wear a pair of the 1940s military dungarees that created the bell bottom style. However, I’m not a purist when it comes to altering vintage. I think that if you buy a garment and it doesn’t fit you right, you need to go straight to your tailor and get it to fit you correctly. But make sure your tailor is experienced in vintage fabrics because they’re different than modern fabrics. I constantly tell customers that I hope the garment I sell them is its last stop because I hope they wear it until it’s unwearable.” Smith also explained that sizing is a huge learning curve in shopping vintage because there is no standardization in sizing, and vintage sizes are completely different than modern-day sizes. She laboriously measures every inch of her vintage clothing and each of her orders comes with a tape measurer to use for future orders. She also regularly posts tutorials on how to properly measure clothing instead of measuring your body. “I really try to move the focus on measuring your favorite piece of clothing right now,” she explained. “If you like how it fits, measure it, and then compare those measurements to another piece of clothing that you’re interested in buying. Because your body is not meant to fit into clothes. Clothes are meant to fit onto you.” Supertouch Vintage For Zachary Keaton, 30, owner of Supertouch Vintage on Navy Boulevard, thrifting and restoring furniture came out of necessity long before it became his passion. He grew up low income in Atlanta, GA helping his grandmother sort through donations at her thrift store and taking first picks of band t-shirts and secondhand clothing. He learned early on about the sheer amount of waste in the world and began to live by a mend-and-makedo mentality to repair furniture, cars and clothing. In February 2020, he opened his store focused on restoring and repairing Danish modern and midcentury modern furniture back to their vintage finishing using original manufacturing techniques. “I started out using all of the wrong techniques at first,” Keaton explained. “Then I learned how to restore furniture properly and moved on to using an air compressor and spray gun like they used
back in the 50s and 60s when they made this furniture. Most of the furniture only needs minor repairs for wood chips and scratches. But, if I do a full teardown restoration, I completely chemically strip the piece. Then, I do a color match to the same color that came out of the factory and refinish it with the same lacquer products they used to manufacture it. They used a lot of aerosol lacquers because the furniture is made out of different species of wood like walnut and birch, so if you stain the entire thing, it will come out multiple colors. You have to color match all the different wood types on a piece.” Keaton explained that running a vintage furniture restoration store by himself is a non-stop job. He spends a lot of time traveling across the South all the way to Texas and Tennessee to pick pieces, repairing furniture, delivering locally to customers and constantly posting finished pieces online, so his storefront is only open two days a week. Keaton also shares a great deal of his restoration process online through videos posted on social media stories so that customers can actually watch his process and know his work is genuine. “I would say 70 percent of my business is online through Instagram and my website. I’m constantly shipping furniture to California, New York and South Korea through Instagram. If I post a rare $3,000 piece in my store, it’s going to take a really particular person to walk in here and buy it, but if I post it on Instagram, suddenly people all over the country are looking at it wanting to buy it and have it shipped to them,” he said. Like many of the vintage clothing sellers that are adamant about fighting fast fashion, Keaton is passionate about restoring vintage furniture to fight the throwaway compressed particle board furniture that is filling up storefronts and landfills. While he can always spot the rare and profitable furniture worthy of 30 hours of his labor to repair and refinish, he’s also passionate about finding solid vintage pieces with little neglect that he can deep clean, touch up and sell for an affordable price. “It’s important to me to have pieces that everyone can afford, because I didn’t grow up with much money,” Keaton said. “I meet a lot of low-income people in the vintage scene, and they also deserve to
WE’RE SOCIAL!
have a cool piece of furniture that’s going to last them another 60 years. I make sure every piece of furniture I sell is professionally cleaned, repaired and ready to last 60+ years, no matter the price I sell it for. I have a console I just sold for $3,500 sitting next to a dresser for $250.” Lemonbright Although she doesn’t identify as a vintage clothing dealer, Nancy Butler, 26, often uses the vintage clothing that nobody wants. Digging through racks and bags of ripped and torn flannels, donated monogram t-shirts that no one will ever buy, or 90s clothing that her friends have kept since their adolescence and outgrown, Butler breathes life back into these garments to keep them out of the landfills. She has been collecting and selling vintage clothing since she was in high school, but it wasn’t until 2016 that the dream for her business, Lemonbright, came to fruition. Butler is a hairstylist at Cobalt Studio and an artist that lives in a Bluebird school bus that she converted into a tiny home and uses as a business base to create and sell her upcycled, handmade clothing. “I was driving to a thrift store in Macon, GA to buy vintage clothes. It was a three-hour drive, and I was crying because my whole life was flipped upside down,” Butler explained. “My mother had just died, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was driving behind a school bus, and I realized buses are huge and that I could live in one of them. I pulled over to a rest stop and started Googling school bus homes, then I walked outside and saw a converted skoolie in the parking lot. When I finally got to the thrift store, I immediately saw a 1980s Bluebird bus hat sitting on a rack, and I knew it was fate. The bus came from a painful part of my life as a way of grieving and trying to create something sustainable for myself.” The conversion took a year and half, and Butler learned everything along the way from YouTube University. In late 2019, she made a switch in her business niche and sold off most of her valuable vintage clothing. She taught herself how to sew on YouTube and began cutting apart and creating hybrid upcycled clothing that allowed her to focus on sustainability, creativity and fighting fast fashion. Lemon-
Continued on Page 3 ›
CONNECT WITH US ON SOCIAL MEDIA