THE HUNT Shareen Mitchell, a vintage boutique owner with a TV show in the works, looks for stock on Long Island.
Published: September 15, 2010
LONG ago, this black taffeta cocktail dress from the Eisenhower era probably knew a happier life — one of icy martinis and tail fins, backyard barbecues and Perry Como ballads. But after years of neglect at the bottom of a garbage bag full of old clothes, its hemline was shredded by rot. It now looked like a burial shroud for Morticia Addams.
But the dress was not a lost cause in the eyes of Shareen Mitchell, a vintage curator and entrepreneur whose cult-favorite shops in Chelsea and Los Angeles have become a treasure chest for red-carpet celebrities, fashion houses and Vogue editors.
It was a muggy afternoon last month, and Ms. Mitchell was on a buying trip to a retired vintage dealer’s house in Port Washington, N.Y., trailed by a camera crew. With the steely squint of an archaeologist on a dig, she ran a finger over a flower-shaped lace design sewn onto the skirt of the dress. The lace pattern, she thought, might inspire a design for a contemporary dress or a T-shirt.
“What I really do is I sort through thousands and thousands of pounds of used clothing, and from that mess I edit out what is useful,” she said. “I’m not that interested in vintage, just for vintage’s sake.”
Indeed, Ms. Mitchell also re-cuts vintage items, turning what might be a throwaway into something completely new and modern, like an ’80s evening grown that might become a strapless minidress.
Until recently, her two stores, which are named Shareen Vintage, have been something of a fashionistas’ secret. She keeps her prices low — pieces are typically $30 to $80 — but she has a strong following among those for whom price is no object, including celebrities like Ivanka Trump, Katy Perry, Christina Hendricks and Michelle Williams.
But her days below the radar may be numbered. Scouts for established designers like Ralph Lauren rummage her racks, looking for ideas. Earlier this summer, she had a pop-up store inside Madewell, the younger offshoot of J.Crew.
And next winter, Ms. Mitchell will star in a new reality show (hence the cameras), “Dresscue Me,” on Planet Green. The show will be equal parts “American Pickers,” with its attic-crawling treasure hunts, and “The Rachel Zoe Project,” with Ms. Mitchell playing the retro-minded makeover genie.
“Shareen does the hard part: she goes all over the United States to gather up these one-of-a-kind garments for designers to come to look,” said Hilary Gaul, vice president for women’s design at Ralph Lauren’s Lauren division. “It’s one-stop shopping. You can see clothing from all different eras in one place, and get print inspiration, trim inspiration, inspiration on silhouette and details.”
Anna Corinna of Foley & Corinna said that Ms. Mitchell “has the eye of a designer,” and added that “every time we go there, we find pieces we use.”
Most vintage clothing dealers, whether they peddle Marcia Brady minidresses to East Village post-grads or $2,000 Halston gowns to Bel-Air socialites, are historians by instinct. Ms. Mitchell, however, considers herself more of a tastemaker than an archivist.
“I don’t want to dress somebody who looks like they’re walking out of a magazine from 40 years ago,” said Ms. Mitchell, who was wearing a 1940s floral floor-length housedress she had re-cut into a Katharine Hepburn-worthy gown on her Long Island jaunt. “I want her to look very fashionable and very now.”
Young Hollywood has embraced her as if she were a hot new designer. Actresses like Busy Philipps (“Cougar Town”) and Autumn Reeser (“Entourage”) have been seen on the red carpet in her outfits. Scarlett Johansson wore a ’40s cream-satin dress from her boutique at the Venice Film Festival a few years ago. “You can look at her face and know that she’s ’40s,” Ms. Mitchell said.
André Leon Talley from Vogue also dropped in to the Los Angeles boutique recently — they made an exception in admitting him, since the boutique has a chalkboard sign that reads “Sorry, no boys allowed” out in front, because they have no dressing rooms and women change in the aisles.
Ms. Mitchell, a former television actress, starting selling vintage clothing from a small booth at the Melrose Trading Post, a Los Angeles flea market, in 2004. Her Los Angeles store has since grown to a 5,000-square-foot warehouse, with half the space devoted to retail, and the other half for the trade (organized by period, textile or condition).
The New York boutique, which opened last year on the second floor of a West 17th Street walk-up, is laid out like an artist’s loft, with 2,000 pieces crammed onto racks. There is no sign. Employees just hang a red dress off the fire escape when the shop is open.
Despite Ms. Mitchell’s encounters with fashion designers and movie stars, the daily duties of her career are less than glamorous. The reality involves burying herself shoulder-deep in musty piles of clothing at textile-recycling warehouses, trying to find gems before they can be shredded into rags. She once found an unworn pink Chanel suit, still with tags, that she bought for $15 and sold for $400, she said.
While Ms. Mitchell employs a team of rigorously trained young assistants to go on buying missions for her at private homes and Salvation Army stores all over Southern California, she doesn’t really seem to trust anyone’s eye but her own. “The fastest way for a girl to lose her job in my store is to start buying, because it’s so hard,” she said. “They have to try to understand my taste.”
Digging through the piles of old clothing in Long Island, she sounded as sternly discerning as a museum curator as she tossed aside pantsuits from the 1970s with a dismissive snort.
Within seconds of picking up a piece, she categorized it by era, fabric, style and sociological context. She lingered on a neatly tailored business suit with shoulder pads, for example, but decided it was too ’80s working-woman to sell, she said. “It was the women’s movement — broad shoulders, ‘I am as much a man as you,’ very covered up,” Ms. Mitchell said of the era. “Women today want to show something off — boobs, backs, legs.”
Sleeker pieces from a decade earlier got more favorable treatment. “The ’70s is happening again in a certain way,” she said. Not the campy disco polyester way, but “the very clean end of the ’70’s — like Faye Dunaway in ‘Eyes of Laura Mars.’ ”
She picked up a suede shift dress in camel by Ted Lapidus. That was a keeper.
