From Vintage Retailer to Design Archivist
Retailer Shareen Mitchell has been known to shoo designers out of Shareen Downtown, her vintage store with a rabid cult following among stylists, starlets and trendsetters.
“I think about it now, and I say to myself, ’I can’t believe I did that!’” Mitchell said, sitting among the thousands of vintage dresses, skirts, jackets, swimsuits and pants that lure women to her out-of-the-way location near downtown.
Mitchell, who shops for her store four days a week, reserves key items for her own archive, which until this summer served as a resource for Shareen, her own line of classic modern dresses.
“That is where I put the most-special, most-fabulous, most-interesting pieces,” she said. The 2,600-piece archive collection fills nearly 30 racks in Mitchell’s studio at the back of her store and grows weekly. Divided by era and design detail, the archive’s racks are dedicated to everything from ’40s skirt suits with origami-like pleats and ’60s dropwaist frocks to frothy gowns, ’70s pants and skirts with high waists, and dresses and tops with unique sleeves, prints, pleats or silhouettes. One rack is marked “ladylike dresses,” and another is reserved for what Mitchell calls “perfect dresses.” A few small tweaks to modernize the design, and these “perfect dresses” would sell like gangbusters today, she said. “I just want to hand them to someone and say, ’If this can help your line, take it and go.’” She points to another rack of delicately tailored dresses. “That should be Banana Republic’s next Fall line. They would die if they saw all of these.”
Now that she has discontinued her own dress line, which sold at Lane Crawford in Hong Kong, as well as Los Angeles–area boutiques Diavolina, Tracey Ross, Satine and Flair Fred Segal, Mitchell is opening up her store and her archives to designers in search of a little or a lot of inspiration.
“I’m amending my hoarding, overprotective ways,” she said. “I was afraid they’d take my ideas, but now I realize there is more than enough inspiration to go around.”
Competition to consultant Mitchell quietly opened her doors to designers in October, and already a handful of designers, from top-tier French and Italian design houses to local contemporary designers, have shopped the store and archive for inspiration. “I think what I built here for myself could be a tremendous resource for other designers. Essentially, everything here is my taste. I love it all and I wanted to use it all, but I can’t. If anyone wants to come and love it with me, then that is great.”
And, while her inspiration racks are exclusively vintage, Mitchell takes exception to the term “vintage-inspired” because everything, no matter how forward, builds on the past, she said. “The girls who shop at my store aren’t retro. They are very forward and individual— and they are willing to go around looking like no one else. In many ways they are more forward than the girls who shop at [more-conventional boutiques],” she said. “Designers who understand that, who understand that vintage is a window to the future and that women want choice, would be well-served here.”
From her sales floor Mitchell tracks trends and styles her customers. She could do the same for des igner s , i f they’d like. “One [design team] came and I c ould t e l l them, to the piece, what stopped girls in their tracks, what dres s every gi r l wanted, what detail every girl has been responding to— and they loved it. It helped them decide what to buy. Others like to work alone, and I weigh in only if they ask me,” Mitchell said.
And in the same way she buys special pieces for her best customers, Mitchell said she keeps an eye out for pieces that might appeal to designers or brands. “I can do that for one designer or 10. I’m out there pulling several times a week. I see a lot, and even if it isn’t right for me, it can be right for someone else,” she said. “Even the best designers want to see beautiful pieces and be inspired to go and make things that say what they want to say. It makes my day to see a perfect dress, and I want to pass that on.”
Mitchell is keeping mum on who exactly is shopping her archives for design inspiration, but retailers who carried her line are excited that she may be helping to shape the work of other designers. “She really has an amazing and creative eye,” said Lindsay Johnson, the buyer at Satine. “I wish her all the best with her future endeavors and will definitely be following her wherever she goes!”
