Fashion is cyclical. The clothing that is trendy to the trendiest now, probably already has a history of being popular in another time. Sitting in her freshly opened vintage shop surrounded by clothing dating back as early as 1910, who knows about cyclical fashion more than Katie Asher?
“The problem with people who wear vintage is as you grow older… fashion is cyclical. It just keeps rotating, it keeps repeating itself. So eventually you’re going to hit a point in your life, where it makes you feel old,” she laughed.
I’m a big fan of secondhand stuff. They’re cheaper in price, friendlier to the Earth than fast fashion, and you’ll find a wider variety of interesting styles. The fun thing about thrifting is that it really brings out your own style, as opposed to letting what’s current at chain fashion stores influence it. Katie is an expert thrifter and curator of vintage clothing. I wrote an earlier newsletter on how she built her thriving vintage business, slip.vintage, on Instagram.
While we talked the first time she discussed her love for all things vintage and how the shop stemmed from not being able to pass up on a good find, whether it was in her size or not. At the end of that conversation, I asked her what’s next and she told me how she hoped to get into a shop of her own. Less than a year later she’s accomplished exactly that.
Art-filled walls, woven throw rugs, a dining room table, and well-proportioned clothing racks make the downtown Traverse City shop feel like shopping at a friend’s voguish apartment. A big reason she wanted a storefront to call home for slip.vintage is space.
“I had to get all of these clothes out of my house. Every day there would be two blue Ikea bags full. Pete would get home and there would be clothes draped all over our couch and in our bedroom. It was too much, and it was hard to stay organized without the separate space.”
She’ll continue to sell clothes off of the slip.vintage Instagram, but now local customers will have a place to come pick their purchased items up if they don’t want to wait on shipping. It also gives her space to do private shopping appointments and get more exposure to downtown shoppers. Slip.vintage is located inside the Front Row Centre building on East Front Street. The building is home to quite a few nice shops and Katie’s excited to help bring more foot traffic into the business center.
You can expect to find any genre of vintage clothing you desire. Jeans, dresses, tops, tee shirts, skirts, pants, and more span over the decades. Now that she has space, Katie plans on bringing vintage homewares in for sale. She also plans on having events.
“I’m going to start in May and come up with a schedule for every month. I want to do intro to mending, learning how to date your clothes, I’d like to do some figure drawing classes. We have a projector screen and I thought of screening old, classic fashion films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Even doing a class about learning how to wear vintage so you don’t look like a costume would be cool.”
She describes her own style as a 1950s dad on vacation mixed with the ‘70s. She’s all for old trends becoming new again, with the exception of low-rise jeans.
“I’m not going back, I refuse. I don’t care what happens to the bottom of pants, straight, skinny, flared, whatever. But I’m not wearing anything lower than an 11’ rise.”
Check her out at @slip.vintage on Instagram, or in person at 121 E. Front Street, Suite #108 Thursdays through Saturdays from 11-5, and Sundays from 11-2 with options to book private appointments on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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Fashion is cyclical. The clothing that is trendy to the trendiest now, probably already has a history of being popular in another time. Sitting in her freshly opened vintage shop surrounded by clothing dating back as early as 1910, who knows about cy...
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