Vintage Stores | the Fashion Spot

Vintage Stores

lirimaer

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Over the years I have visited a LOT of vintage and second hand stores and always wondered where on earth the goods come from? Even small online stores seem to have amazing and cheap vintage finds. Is there anyone out there who knows the mistery behind this?
 
I knew a vintage dealer fairly well and she would always talk about going to estate sales. I am sure some of them also scour thrift/flea markets as well. It's just about having a good eye and knowing what's worth it and what isn't.
 
Public and private auction, probate and estate sales are the primary sources for vintage goods.
 
I think ebay is quite good in vintage. Once I bought a pair of vintage boots from 1900 in a really expensive vintage store, only to realize that on ebay you can get many of such boots for one third of what I paid. :angry:
Otherwise my best tip is to visit second hand shops in small towns - they sometimes dont know what they are dealing with :), so you can make very good deals there.
 
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I've been scouring ebay lately...I've been wondering how some people acquire the obscure vintage stuff. Interesting.
 
We have two pretty good vintage boutiques downtown. I mostly only go to one of them (Trappings of Time). Both are very small and cramped, but they have the most AWESOME stuff (this one time I found a Ritz cracker vest. haha).
 
In California, you can go to places like the Rose bowl flea market. And besides home/entertainment antiques, they also have a gigantic clothes section. It seriously is endless. Im pretty sure many vintage retailers come here to either trade or buy the clothes they sell to other people, because they can find such great deals. But it's also open to the public, so I've been able to find so many great things there. A store by where I live admitted they get some stuff from Japan, go figure. I wonder when all the vintage resources will finally be tapped.

My mother still had, luckily, a lot of her vintage clothes from her youth in Mexico. I asked her what happened to a lot of that clothes now. She said that people never had a penchant for old clothes where she lived. And that if it has been kept, it's in some sort of dark storage in personal homes. Supposedly her dad made a makeshift mattress full of their vintage clothes - the mattress may be elusive and gone...but I wonder if it really exists. Now that would be strange.
 
^ That's a really cool story. I'd love to find that mattress..that's amazing.
 
A lot of vintage stores buy in clothing in bulk from places, such as charities etc. They buy in the kilos and then mass clean/dry them, re-tag and re-sell.

Some items are donated to them, in the sense people are cleaning out their own closet or ahem 'loved ones' who aren't here...

Sometimes they get items from flea markets.

There are also estate sales, where people will buy all the pieces to put in their stores.
Also auctions.

Sometimes de-accessioning of inventory from some museums, collectors.
There was some store in London that on their website detailed how they went about sourcing their clothes and had pictures of it. If I find it I will post.
 

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