Happy Holidays from NorthStar Vintage

May you get everything that you want.

My newest obsession

I can't resist lawn art. The more bizarre, the better.

Random sign letters are good too.


There are so many incredibly crazy, weird old things out there.

Which is why I get crabby in stores like Home Goods or the Christmas Tree Shoppe; all that Made in China decor adds stress to our environment, in its creation, shipment, and ultimately, disposal (because the tchotchkes are so cheaply made, it's easy to chuck them).

We shouldn't be spoon fed our decor. There are a zillion environmentally friendly options out there. While not the hippest gal out there, Martha Stewart is my idol - the woman could decorate an estate using flower pots, cardboard boxes, and a glue gun.

And of course, ultimately (and selfishly), I think we should apply this concept to clothing. Vintage is green, it's non-exploitive, and still, it looks damn cool.

Since you asked

I bought a Paul McCobb chair. It looks great on the shiny new floors!


And today I am finally listing some of the great pieces I've acquired over the past few weeks!

When it rains it pours

I'm going on a big cross state motorcycle trip tomorrow. I am excited. I would be SUPER excited if I weren't missing some cool local stuff.

Day of Destruction. Smash-em-up at the local speedway. Possibly the most irony-free spot in the country.

Picnic Music and Arts Festival. I want to buy, I want to sell, I want to schmooze. I want to see good live music. Might have to come back early for this one.

Meathouse Wine Tasting. Booze and meat!

Space Homecoming Dance. Not to brag, but I have the best prom dresses in town.

Still - this is the kind of trip I will remember forever. As long as the old girl (my BMW) (and me) can make the trip.

Goth Redux

Because I work from home, I don't have much opportunity to dress up. And when I do leave the house for something fancier than the post office or grocery store, I have a uniform - black top, black skirt, black tights, black boots, silver accessories, big black bag.

And all of a sudden, thanks to the Goth Revival, I am in style, even if it's by default, and even if it's because I've just been holding on to the look since the first go round, in the 1980's. And yes, I had a Bauhaus record. Hell, I had the extended dance remix of "Bela Lugosi's Dead."

So this Goth Revival lets me embrace the things I loved in the past - like these red winklepicker skull buckle boots from *capricornvintage* (Identical to those worn by the one goth girl in my big northeast university who had a name that was spelled normally and pronounced abnormally. She had a leather jacket with spikes (!) that caught on angora sweaters, and once went to a sorority rush dressed as a nun).

Click photo for link to auction.

It also makes me want to go shopping for more black things, as I always need more black clothes (click photos for link):

Moschino Black Patent Platform Mary Janes at Zappos

Flower/Skull Pendant from Vivenne Westwood

Marc Jacobs Rolling Rings Dress at Nordstrom.

80's Black Ruched Dress on eBay

Dsquared Plaid/Black Lug Soled Booties on Zappos

Vintage Bulletin

Thank you to Carol at Dandelion Vintage for the mention in last week's Vintage Bulletin about this 1960's black sequinned cocktail dress:

Tex

Wants in. (taken while i was photographing clothing to list online. it's not like i got out a camera to photograph the poor bastard while he was dangling off the screen - i already had it in hand!)

I'm biased

But early advertising for BMW motorcycles is the coolest. Love that teutonic Deco industrial look!

Black Sex Jumpsuit

I want:



From the James Brown Auction.

Say it again! Black Sex Jumpsuit.

I love him.

Hand made wooden Kewpie plant holder? ash tray? peanut dish?

From a yard sale in Western Maine.

The look on his face cracks me up - as if someone just pinched his little bottom.

Damn I find good stuff

As my clearout extends to my cyber presence, I've been cleaning out the photos hosted on my server, meaning I get to go through thousands of shots from the past few years. It's tedious, but it's cool to see some of the things I've sold, like:

1930's Art Deco Print Dress

1950's Ceil Chapman Silk Jersey Dress

1920's Cycle Club Jersey (in wool! ugh!)

1950's Reindeer Applique Parka

1950's Harvey Berin Dress

1950's Black All in One Girdle

Iconic 1950's Claire McCardell Blue Dress

1940's Copper Satin Suit with Double Peplum

1938 Embroidered "Beer" Jacket

Best Novelty Print Ever

Like most people who are into vintage clothing, I am a serious sucker for novelty prints. My favorite theme is "the impossible": Reading dogs; Edwardian women riding motor scooters; fuschia horses; hippos on unicycles....

As much as I love novelty prints, I've never met one so cool that I couldn't bring myself to sell it. Until now. I have met my match, and it's formidable. A 1950's blouse in a futurist newspaper print.

It's "dated" April 1, 1999 (get it?). Not surprisingly, the 50's vision of the future involved people living on the moon, atomic devices, aliens, pills instead of meals, a one hour work week, and my favorite, the portable TV, which looks a lot like my Mac laptop.

I love this shirt.

Vintage....music

Every kid in my high school loved Rush. Except me. I figured that if everyone liked them, then I was far too "alternative" to follow the herd.

Getting older can be enlightening. And giving up "the cool" can be a hell of a lot of fun. Because every kid in my high school was right and I was wrong. Rush rocks. ROCKS. I saw them live last night. 10th row. I now have a wee (okay, huge) crush on Geddy Lee.

How could I not?! He just gets more and more dreamy.

One of the things I love about anything vintage is that it's removed from its original context, and you can view the band, the dress, the movie objectively, without the situational bias. Of course there's nostalgia - the 80's clothing I sell evokes all sorts of memories. But when I see it today, without drowning in teen-age angst, it looks so much better.

Just like Geddy Lee (meow). I can't wait for the next Rush concert.

Buy Local

While listing this 60's pink silk dress, I did some research on the designer, Mary Sachs. According to this site, she opened her first store in 1918, which blossomed into a small chain of stores in the mid-Pennsylvania area, and she was a generous and influential member of the community.

I see a lot of beautiful vintage clothing, made by "smaller" designers, who had a niche in their region.

Her stores were special - I'm sure the salespeople knew their clients, and that the experience of going shopping as as much of an allure as the clothing themselves.

Now it's anonymity in Marshall's, the warehouse overload of Old Navy, or the constant subtle (but not) sales pressure from fake-friendly 20 somethings at the The Limited. Sadly, there are few places where you know the person who made the clothing, and the sales folks are also your friends.

That's why I try to buy local when I can. My links include lots of people in the Portland area (and some outside) who create beautiful things. And I like to buy from them.

Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks that Portland has a great scene. Design*Sponge agrees!

Profile Picture

Judging from my Dorothy Hamill haircut, it was taken in the summer of 1977.

My sister is wearing a bombshell (for a 7 year old) black velvet 50's party dress (I shudder to think there was a designer label inside), and the other two girls are in pretty pink floral party dresses.

Me? I chose the secretary look. Not a sexy (for a 9 year old) secretary look. It was more the look of the secretary who has been with the firm for 50 years and secretly scares everyone because she knows all their dirt. Red skirt, white blouse with a high ruffled neck and a pink cardigan. In July. Yeesh.

We had found the clothes at a 4th of July Rummage Sale in Standish, Maine. $1.00 a bag. It on a lawn in the village (I CLEARLY remember it Nancy!). *My sister swears it was held in the fire barn, but that was a later, not so good, rummage sale. (We also disagree about who caught that bluefish at Cape May in the early 70's (Nancy just because I handed the pole over to you after it bit doesn't mean you caught it!)].

At the age of 9, I didn't "get" vintage clothing, I just knew we found some cool dressup. But I remember peplums and velvet and chiffon, and my mother and our neighbor going on about the old clothes. We kept them in a tent outside of the house and put on a fashion show at the end of the summer to raise money for ice cream.

And then they got mildewed or filled with bugs and my mother tossed them all. Those clothes, along with my 1970's Matchbox cars and my dad's 1950's baseball cards, are pretty much the only thing she ever threw out.

What I've been doing

We had our bi-annual yard sale here at NorthStar Vintage Corporate Headquarters this week. It was a lot of work - every time I do this I question the wisdom of holding a "cocktail preview" for friends the night before. It does not enhance the experience of waking up and dealing with "early birds."

Still, clearing out is a great feeling, and just being outside makes me happy.

HERE are some pics of the setup. We still have that damn mixing board.

And now back to our regularly scheduled posting and listing.

Hello Dollyrockers!

Here in Maine I come across lots of great wool and work vintage, and most money was "old money" so good cutting edge pre-90's pieces are hard to find.

So I considered myself extremely lucky to find a 60's Rudi Gernrich dress, even if it was a fairly conservative shift dress. But yesterday I found a rarity - a dress from the British Boutique Movement (Ossie Clark, Jean Muir, Celia Birtwell) - a 1970's wench look dress from Dollyrockers.

Here she is!

Serendipity

I never imagined that I'd able to use my beloved framed photo of Mr. Chicago 1944 (and runners up) as a tie in to one of my auctions. But sometimes selling vintage creates the lovelist coincidences:

Meet Mr. Chicago 1944 (and runners up):

And meet, a racy pair of 1940's satin swim trunks. Mr. Chicago 1944 (or one of his runners up) would have totally rocked these:

Nostalgia

I was a teenager/young adult during the 80's and initially had a hard time accepting that 80's clothing (and music) as "vintage."

But I see now the beauty in the adaption of New Wave and the inverted triangle silhouette. Plus, I am compensated by the opportunity to indulge in some nostalgia. Some memories, like those of my prom and craptastic prom dress, are bad. Some memories are good, like those resurrected by selling this early 1980's Grateful Dead t-shirt.



I have (or had) a shirt almost identical, purchased at a Dead show in the mid-80's.

In spring of 1984, on a whim, some friends and I decided to go see the Grateful Dead at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine. We knew nothing about the band - they hadn't had their big "I Will Get By" hit, and we had never heard the term "Deadhead." We just thought it would be an interesting rock show and a fun place to get stoned and meet guys. The tickets were $14.50 and we were able to buy them a few days before the show.

And so the three of us, all starters on the state championship field hockey team - the goalie, myself (a fullback) and the other fullback went to see the Dead. And us three girls, in from the boondocks of Maine, in our pegged pants and fluffy hair, were smitten. The Deadheads were in full, patchouli-reeking, shrooming force. And all that crazy dancing and hugging!

Next fall we saw them in Augusta Civic Center - an even smaller venue. This time we knew what to expect, and indulged accordingly. We met two boys we called "Chewey" (as in Chewbacca) and "Spacey" (self-explanatory) and I think there was some making out. Luckily we did not have a game the next day, as we, the last two lines of defense against goals, were feeling rather sluggish.

I went on to college and checked out Dead shows when I could, though by then they were playing stadiums and tickets were expensive and rare. The goalie dropped out of college and gave up her full field hockey scholarship to follow the band. The other fullback managed to stay in school, but was still a Deadhead.

Sadly, I think that during my punk rock days I threw away my t-shirt in a fit of Dead-hating angst. I wish I still had it!

Prom!

This weekend I watched my neighbor going to her senior prom. She wore a strapless wine satin gown with beading on the bust, and a matching shawl. It looked beautiful with her pale skin and black (dyed) hair. Her boyfriend wore a top hat and long tuxedo jacket, and he seemed pretty pimped out for a Maine prom. But...well...my prom date ended up committing some rather serious crimes, so I guess I'm not one to judge.

I envied my pretty neighbor in her classic gown. She won't be embarrassed in 20 years, like some of us. I wore a Gunne Sax. A huge puffy white Gunne Sax that looked as if it was made of toilet paper.

And yes, I have developed an appreciation for vintage Gunnes, and I love to sell them all the lovely, hip gals out there. But mine was a monstrosity. Even today it would be unhip, and not even in a good, ironic way.

Pictures exist, but I will not post them here, as this blog is more about my business than about my fashion mistakes (which would be a blog in itself).

In honor of 80's and bad prom dresses, I give you the ultimate 1980's bad prom dress. Even when I first saw this movie, and was completely under the spell of John Hughes, I thought this was an abomination. And the salt on the wound? She cut up a vintage dress to create this horror show.