SHRIMPTON COUTURE – Yours in vintage

TORONTO (Herald de Paris) - I was pleased as punch when asked by L’ Herald de Paris to be a couture columnist, but was a little stuck as where to start. Writing a vintage themed column that just might just be the first of its kind anywhere is a potentially daunting task, so where to begin? In the process of trying to come up with that perfect first theme for my inaugural column I could not help but to think of firsts in general.

First I should introduce myself. I own Shrimpton Couture , an on-line emporium that specializes in vintage & couture pieces from eras past, with a few new designers – selected by me – who love to rework vintage and give it their own touch, thrown into the mix. I have been asked to “share my vintage perspective” with the readers of L’Herald, though where that might take us remains to be seen. I hope we can become fast friends, you and I, and I hope I can entertain you, share what I know about the world of vintage and perhaps make you think again about wearing and loving vintage if you are not already a firm fan.

There are certain things that instantly spring to mind when thinking of firsts aren’t there? Your first love, your first kiss, the first time you danced with a boy (or girl), all of those instantly come to mind. But from a vintage perspective, the first thoughts that come to my mind are a tad different.

There is the first time I opened a copy of Vogue and discovered that there was an entire world of women who were accomplished, beautiful and immaculately put together. I was perhaps 15 and lived in a very small town where no one knew one designer label from another. I was born into a town where woman married young and became moms, albeit great ones, but this was a fate my 15 year old self rebelled against. Those pages in my treasured, dog eared copied of Vogue gave me a glimpse of the possibilities of a life that was out there, waiting for me to find it for myself. There would be an article in every issue about some wonderful society girl whose grandmother handed down her Hermes bags, Dior and Pucci’s to. These vintage pieces were of course not referred to as vintage back then, but as “special pieces”, handed down from one generation to another. I wanted to have the closets of those girls, a wonderful, magical closet of designer pieces and “special pieces” and I now do. I hope that one day I will be the first in my family to hand down my heirlooms to my own granddaughters.

I remember well the first piece of vintage that I ever purchased. I bought it from a second hand shop in that same small town. It was a lightweight, just above the knee, cream jacket made out of fine wool crepe with little looping appliqués sewn over each front pocket. It was far too old for me, but I wore it anyway and I wore it to death – with jeans, with skirts, to my first job interview as I tried to look far beyond my 15 years of age. I wore it on first dates and nights out with friends. It’s long gone, but like many firsts it will never really be forgotten. It gave me a confidence that was beyond my years and impacted me forever on how I would regard hunting for and finding pieces that make me feel special when I wear them.

When you do what I do, there is a rather special kind of first that happens to you once in a while. It is when someone that you go to see to buy some dress from, shares with you their story of that dress. I have heard stories of the first time a girl fell in love in the 1950s wearing a cupcake of a dress with a cinched in waist and full, full skirt. Occasionally, there are still bits of confetti lodged in the lace of the bust of these party frocks from high school dances from a more innocent time. I have heard the story of the dress, worn by its owner who is now bent and stooped, a dress made with her own hands to go to her first dance with a boy, in the days when that was as risqué an event as a girl would have in her young life. A dress made by sewing tiny little glass bead after bead to create a work of art back in the roaring, heady days of the 1920s. The eyes of that young girl sparkling out at me through a wizened face as she recants the hours by candlelight that she sewed till it was just so and she knew it would make him fall in love with her, because it was finally right. I have had a dress passed to me that marked the eve of the conception of a first born child and the love emanates from it still.

I have always firmly believed that vintage pieces carry with them the spirits of the fabulous woman who wore those garments to all of their own firsts. All the kisses, the love, the tears, the heartbreak, the joy; all captured in the fabrics and folds of each dress, awaiting the next girl to add her own firsts to their story.

At times in the future I hope to share some of those stories with you in more detail. I hope to introduce you to specific designers of the past and learn who they were and why they are so important today. I might just dwell on what at surface seems mundane – like why the seaming in a vintage dress is a wondrous, beautiful thing. I can’t fully say where this might go, this being my very first column, but I can tell you that the journey will become its own story.

And if I feel doubt about what to write, if I worry about how you might find my writing, well then perhaps I will slip on the latest find, wearing it for the first time as I sit down at my keyboard. I will close my eyes and let its folds and seams whisper to me and give me the confidence that I might not truly have, but that I will borrow from its past and my own. The past where a 15 year old girl, who yearned for the lives of those fabulous woman who wore and loved vintage before me, now celebrates what they have left behind.

And then I will begin to write

Yours in vintage

Cherie

Shrimptoncouture.com

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