The Shop, The Coat, And The Hand Flex

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At the end of October I closed down my old vintage shop that I had had for over seven years. It’s the longest I’ve ever worked anywhere. On one cold evening as I was scratching off the window graphics with a carpet knife and saw my shop’s name disappear from the window one letter at a time, I was expecting to feel somber or at least nostalgic, but instead I felt relief. 

Last spring I had considered quitting, thinking that perhaps I had outgrown being a shopkeeper. The more I thought about it, it became evident that I was just exhausted and frustrated. The second hand and vintage market is tumultuous right now. Consumer-to-consumer sales and international bulk vendors are overrunning traditional vintage sellers, and consumers are frantically buying vintage with a fast fashion mentality that focuses on cheap prices. What’s lost in the convenience of it all is expertise and reliability. To make a long story short: it’s tough out there for people like me and my sister, who runs her own vintage shop alongside mine. The way things were going, we were looking at closing down our joint brick-and-mortar shop eventually, if we didn’t make a change.

My sister and I had a decision to make, and it was something that my nephew said a while ago that became our guiding light: we could either adjust to the current situation and keep up with the times, or do our own thing and excel at our niche. In our context this meant a choice between selling more Y2K, joining every social media platform and every selling app and trying to figure out what the fickle vintage customer wants, and doing our own thing, keeping it small and compact, and relying on what we know best, which is actual vintage clothes. We decided to do the latter. We got a much smaller shop space, cut costs where we could, and began to develop a new concept that’s more flexible and has (hopefully) a wider reach.

This is where we are. Not too shabby, right?

After the chaos of organizing a month-long moving sale, packing up the old shop, and two full working days of moving madness, the new brick and mortar took weeks to set up. It’s in a different neighborhood, closer to the center of town. The building is from 1928. We have a beautiful arched window and a ten foot ceiling. The paint job alone took three days. We did everything ourselves and with the help of our life partners. I can cross off ‘working on a scaffolding’ from my list of things I haven’t done before. 

The new shop two days before opening... and on opening day.

I named the new shop Victor Victoria Vintage. It’s a nod to the 1982 Blake Edwards movie starring Julie Andrews, but it’s also a play on gender, which is the running theme in my selection of clothes and accessories. I’ve always been fascinated by the push and pull between womenswear and menswear, and I’m curating in a way that feels more organic and a lot more personal now. I get to learn more about vintage menswear now, too, which I’m really excited about.

I used to keep a close eye on what other professional sellers were curating, but I have very little interest in that now. I just want to focus on what I think is best. Who knows, it might not be the smartest thing to do in terms of running a successful business, but at least I’m doing something I love and can be proud of.

We opened our shop to the public last weekend. We were still cleaning and frantically running around, making sure everything looked right, five minutes before opening, terrified, worrying what would happen if no one came. But people came and they shopped. Once the dust settles down a little bit, we’ll begin developing an international online presence.

We’re still missing proper window display lights. That’s my sister at the door, locking up the night before our opening day. Also, you don’t know darkness if you haven’t visited Finland in November.

I feel awkward plugging my own shop, but you can follow Victor Victoria Vintage on Instagram here. I’d be grateful for a follow, a like, a comment or a share. My marketing budget is nonexistent at the moment, so every little helps. My sister’s side of the business is called Frida Marina Vintage and you can find her IG account here.

I wore this to work yesterday. Ravensummer became ravenfall, then ravenwinter.

As you might imagine, it’s been quiet on my personal style front. I’ve been so busy with the shop that I haven’t had the time to think about my own style much. I pulled out my winter clothes from storage a few weeks ago, and it was the best feeling: to unpack the heavy wools and the shearling coats, and everything fits and feels the way I remembered them. My vintage winter clothes spark an emotion that’s familiar and dear. The vapidity of newness can’t compete.

I am experiencing the all-too-familiar anxiety over winter shoes again. I’m not surprised, as this happens every year after the first snow hits the ground. After many, many years of complaining about the ugliness of winter footwear, I’m still waiting for the perfect winter shoes to come along and I don’t know if that will ever change. I hadn’t been planning on looking for new shoes this season, because I was thinking that I could get by with what I have. But on Friday, as I made my way to work through the slushy streets of Helsinki, my black insulated ankle boots began to leak. I cursed audibly. The hunt for winter shoes begins once again, and I already hate it. The thought of shopping for a specific need feels cacophonous. Noisy in the brain. Noisy in the heart. I don’t have the bandwidth for it. I have grown to seriously dislike online shopping, and going into shops that sell new things doesn’t feel any more appealing to me.

The only type of shopping I care for right now is the serendipitous kind. Earlier this week I visited a tiny thrift store on a whim. When I walked in, the first piece of clothing that I saw, strangely placed at the butt end of a rack full of track pants and athletic gear, was a long black double-breasted men’s winter overcoat. I could tell from the first glance that the coat was old. There’s a certain stiffness and heft in old wool winter coats. They don’t really drape. They have form. 

The tag revealed that the coat was made in the city of Viipuri, meaning that it was probably manufactured in the 1930s. (Finland lost Viipuri to the Soviet Union in WWII, so garments made there by Finnish companies are fairly easy to date. You can read about my earlier musings regarding a certain morning suit made in Viipuri here.) I just grabbed the coat and took it to the cash register. I felt that I had to save it. At home I tried the coat on. Its weight had my knees buckle, quite literally. It hugged my neck and shoulders like a giant weighted blanket. It hung on my body in a way that was simultaneously unyielding and strangely comforting. 

I completely lost my marbles over that coat. Even as I’m writing this, my heart beats faster than it probably should. On the day I bought the coat, I hung it out on the balcony to air out and I went outside to see it several times during the evening. I brought it back in a couple times, just to look at it closer. I investigated its beautiful lining from every angle: how the rest of the coat is lined with heavy black rayon, but the lining of the sleeves was made of black-and-white stripy cotton. I admired the insides of the pockets that are made of soft gray flannel, to keep the hands warm. At night in bed I couldn’t sleep because I thought about the coat. I pulled up pictures from my phone to look at them one more time before falling asleep.

Coat details: 1) The tag shows the location of Viipuri in Finland before the Moscow Armistice of 1944. An online search revealed that the manufacturer used this logo at least until 1940. 2) The sleeves are lined with stripy cotton. 3) The pockets are made of flannel.

It’s a really big coat. The sleeves are very wide, which is typical of men’s coats from this era. I’ve been thinking about intended fit recently: how important it is that clothes fit the body properly, for their construction to maintain shape and for the fabric to do its job. An ill fitting piece of clothing hangs wrong. It pulls in weird places. But here was this coat that perhaps didn’t fit me perfectly, but I still loved it. There’s extra space in the chest and the back. The sleeves are a little bit too long. So be it. I don’t even want to have it altered. I want it just as it was in the 1930s and just as it is now. I want to own it until I die.

I was testing the sleeve length, but ended up with the Mr Darcy hand flex. If you know, you know.

I can’t quite remember the last time I’ve felt so emotional about a piece of clothing. I’ve been appreciative and curious about a lot of garments over the years, but this… this is something else. I can’t explain it. Maybe I lived in Viipuri in a previous life. Either way, this is how I like to shop.

Lastly: I haven’t been active on Substack for weeks now, and there are many, many comments, shares and likes I haven’t responded to or reacted to. It will take me a while to catch up, but I just wanted to say that I see that many new people have found my small space of Substack while I’ve been away. Thank you for your patience and for being here. I love you all, and I hope to become more engaged with the community again soon.

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