It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
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NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
January 5, 2023
FASHION & BEAUTY
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
HASSON
January 5, 2023
FASHION & BEAUTY
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
January 5, 2023
FASHION & BEAUTY
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
No items found.
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
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Pink
frost
Thistle
brown
January 5, 2023
FASHION & BEAUTY
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
Super talented stylist-turned-photographer Thistle Browne and stylist Heathermary Jackson — both in New Zealand during COVID-19 lockdowns — traveled to Rangitoto Island, a dormant volcano off the coast of Central Auckland, to shoot the new campaign for New Zealand jewelry designer Jasmin Sparrow. The shoot showcases Sparrow’s timeless gold and silver jewelry, and a beautiful collection of hand-beaded bras and skull caps designed with Glen Prentice. Models wore mainly vintage from Search and Destroy and Brownstone Cowboys’ collection, combined with some local, sustainable brands and New Zealand gumboots (rainboots).
Photography:Thistle Brown Styling:Heathermary Jackson Designers: Jasmin Sparrow and Glen Prentice Models: Charlotte Moffatt, Nina Katungi, Obadiah Russon
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
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NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
January 5, 2023
FASHION & BEAUTY
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
January 5, 2023
FASHION & BEAUTY
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
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NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
January 5, 2023
FASHION & BEAUTY
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
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NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
FASHION & BEAUTY
October 11, 2023
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
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NYC Vintage: James Veloria and Chinatown Chic
January 5, 2023
Fashion & Beauty
Photographer: Alex Lockett
Article/Interview/Model: Camille Bavera
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
It is a tradition on my mother’s side of the family for every girl to spend her sweet 16 in New York City. My mother and older sister went to Broadway shows, dinner at Sardi’s, shopping at Macy’s on 34th st, toured the NYU campus… normal ritzy city glamor. I was a little different. And while I didn’t own them yet, I was already seeing New York through the vintage Tom Ford shades I always sport. I took my mum hunting for old Thierry stilettos, and headed to the jazz clubs that I admittedly found on TimeOut. We did not go to see Wicked and certainly not to The Phantom of The Opera.
The thing I wanted on this trip more than anything was to go to the nightclub called VNYL - Vintage New York Lifestyle - because that’s where the cool kids went. Was it actually vintage? No. Were the ‘cool kids’ late twenties and early thirty-somethings just drinking, dancing, and clubbing, IDs checked at the door? Yes.
I walked the forty-something blocks in those new-to-me vintage Thierry’s only to be sent away, 5 birthdays shy of legal entrance to the club, with Joe Jonas inside and just beyond my reach. But undefeated, I clomped back to our midtown hotel, my firm belief in the beauty of a vintage lifestyle unshaken.
Getting to break the glass on several of New York’s best if not most renowned vintage stores, and live out of many past lives in these photoshoots had me beside myself. The side of me that should've attended Harvard in the 1970’s was able to don full-on rugby prep while my Gen-Z girlie persona gelled up her money strands that framed my perfectly transparent, shadeless shades. The real New York vintage lifestyle does exist, even if the club closed during the pandemic, and will always hold a special place for me; even when I too no longer operate in this city.
I call this the ‘If you know, you know: New York” edition. Enjoy, and take advantage of what this city has to offer, because we certainly did. Here is the second installment of the New York City vintage series, James Veloria.
I had the pleasure of encountering the world of James Veloria firsthand at Spring Studios NYFW The Talks this February, but visiting Brandon and Collin at their LES vintage hub has been on the agenda since we thought up this series last year. After developing a working relationship through their clothing rental service (it is no longer a part of their business), my editor made it a point to have the vintage-clad brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria on our list of must-trys-ons. Consequently, it was the first store on the BSC agenda. They have a unique way of dropping hand-picked, themed collections of vintage clothing - from Celine to Miami heat - but what really grabbed our attention is their attention to sustainable practices, which include reusing their price tags by merely replacing the price sticker. It’s one of those things you may never think of (although we have already stolen the tag trick and reuse the same tags at all of our BSC Vintage stoop sales), but to them, vintage is an industry that is “inherently renewable and special and interesting”; and sustainability equals simplicity.
“I mean, it's easy to be sustainable. It's actually really easy.”
Both halves of James Veloria have always been into buying and selling vintage, and if you love what you do or what you sell, then it’s not really working - or so said Maya Angelou. But it can be a business. Which seems to be why time has flown and the store is set to celebrate its five year anniversary in August. Here’s Collin and Brandon on Miami, vintage furniture, pop-ups, and paying it forward.
JV: What do we do? How do we keep it going? I mean, maybe we're just all addicted - who work in fashion. I don't know what it is but there’s so much pressure to keep producing new shit, or host new events or like, fast fashion has to have new stuff all the time. That stuff is easy to buy, but it then affects people's need to keep up with buying. I know why that demand isn't sustainable, ultimately, because it's wasteful. It's trying to figure out how to always have something new, even if you've been in our store two weeks ago, us having something new that’s not just filler or stuff that, you know, we're gonna be stuck with.
BSC: I feel like a lot of vintage stores are niche, because I mean, it's growing. The need and the want is growing. And so you have to sort of have a niche in order to be successful because you can't carry some of everything. So then you have to choose, and what do you do? I guess what I'm trying to ask, is it better to have a little bit of everything, or is it better to have a very specific collection?
JV: It's really been so important to only buy stuff that we're into. I think when we started people would come in and say, I'm looking for 1940s or 50s dresses and stuff like that. And we thought about whether we should maybe include some of this or not. And really, if you're not into it, it's not sustainable for you as a person. So we really only buy things that we're interested in, and that can constantly change. And I feel like, as a business or a person - creatively - that's just gonna end up being better in the long run than trying to chase your customers and what they might want. I feel like it's too stressful. Plus, in New York, you have no space to store stuff. So for us it was ‘how do we pare it down, to what we really love and that we know is going to sell in a week so we can buy more?’
BSC: I think that's really important, to me as a person, to be very sustainable. So when I heard you talking about Vintage through that lens during NYFW, I was pretty hooked on your brand. So thank you for making an effort.
JV: Yeah, that was so sweet - talking with Liana and a few other people. It's always been a way that we've just shopped personally. In general I feel like there's so much clothing out in the world, and there just keeps being more and more and more that there's no reason to buy anything new. We just moved into a new apartment so of course, we're gonna buy an amazing, old vintage couch. It's also the thrill of the hunt. You know, once you find that really special piece that not many people are going to have, and it's just right for you. It feels more special than just going to a big box store and getting the same thing that everyone else got.
BSC: No, I know. I moved into an apartment last year and I ended up taking the furniture from the girl who left it there. And in the year since I’ve been to two friends’ new places who have the same Ikea bed as me. And I was like, ‘What did I do wrong? Why do I have the same bed as everyone else?’
JV: At least you re-used someone’s stuff. Everything in the store we try to reuse - even the tags. We take the price off and put a new sticker over it. Every little thing that you would otherwise throw away we just tried to make sure that it finds a way to be used for as long as possible at least. I mean, we are at least trying although we could do better in many ways, I’m sure.
BSC: I know. And so many businesses and designers are crunching their numbers and worrying about how to be sustainable. But vintage is so inherently sustainable. It's kind of amazing.
JV: Exactly. It's just inherently renewable and special and interesting. And there will always be vintage. People get so stressed about it, like ‘Is it going to go away?’ or whatever but there's always going to be vintage. There are so many more vintage stores now than there were five years ago; still plenty to go around. If you just dig around there’s always old stuff.
BSC: Yeah. And again, it's that thrill of the hunt that's the best part. But you're right, because as time passes on, more and more becomes ‘vintage.’ I mean, it's crazy to think y2k is pretty much considered vintage at this point because it’s reached that twenty year mark.
JV: Yeah 22 years. So definitely 2010 Marc Jacobs, all of that stuff I feel is coming back around or at least it’s what I've been looking at a lot. And it's, and it's very much from a period that I remember living and now again it feels relevant. It feels relevant to me. And I feel like I'm seeing it in new designs. It's not a secret that a lot of designers shop vintage to sort of build out their collections and for inspiration. And definitely through collecting and just seeing an old pair of Ghesquiere Balenciaga pants without the buttons or the Marc Jacobs Breton collection in the wild, or even designers redoing their old stuff when everyone else is knocking it off. They're like, well, we'll just do what we did in the 90s because it was ours to begin with and other people are redoing it. Might as well make some more money off of it!
BSC: I'm guessing you both share the experience of designers coming in to pull reference pieces. But what do you gravitate towards when you're curating? I almost hate to use that word curating, it’s becoming so overused and broad at this point.
JV: I think the best part of owning your own business is that you can make it whatever you want it to be. So I would say like our next collection is actually all Michael Kors and Celine in the late nineties to like 2004. It's more just like luxe traveling, occasionally slutty kind of clubbing on a tropical island sort of thing. five years. Yeah, we've been in Miami a lot this year, weirdly after living in New York for a decade we have discovered how easy it is to love Miami. And this collection is so just like rich Miami, slutty, colors of a sunset. We’ve definitely been into more avant-garde in the past, like you'll always find old Margiela and Comme in the store, but then there are little things that we introduce that we're interested in that maybe aren't quite where we started? But they add something new to compliment those things and are bringing in a new customer.
BSC: So do you drop collections with the seasons like designers?
JV: Whenever we feel like it. Our last one was a Stella McCartney at Chloe collection that we launched in April. And then we also work with newer vintage dealers to help them get their businesses started or to help them help introduce their collections to our customers. So we did one with Gabriel Held in January, which went really well. And we're just wrapping up a collection we did with stylist Maria Lepore who had a lot of amazing, more femme y2k pieces.
So many people helped us out at the beginning, just by giving us a platform to sell which gave us a wider audience. Like Opening Ceremony letting us do pop-ups in their stores. So we want to kind of return the favor now that we have space and also a little bit more of a following where we could actually be a platform for newer people.
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