Dresses from Attics

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am slightly addicted to clothes. Long coats, so long that they drag through puddles. Second-hand silk shirts, completely transparent but so pretty with their tiny floral prints. Designer dresses snaffled up for less than £5 from a charity shop. An ideal shopping trip right there.

I’ve also had a lot of trouble with clothes. I have never managed to find the perfect black shoes. In the depths of winter, I eventually find passable black boots, and in summer my Birkenstocks take over, but I have never found a transition shoe, which I envision as a substantial but subtle brogue-type thing which will withstand miles of walking and wandering. They must be versatile enough to match dresses and cropped trousers, and not so prim that I look like I’ve gone back to school. I will probably continue to complain about this (seemingly endless) hunt until the shoes have been found. It may be some time.

In the vintage clothes department, I’m very lucky to live in a town with so many charity shops, a second-hand designer shop, and my family’s own antiques business. My parents are constantly uncovering attics full of vintage items, many of them odd, homemade, and occasionally downright ugly. But it’s always fun to re-discover these pieces, to wash and iron them, to see them given a new life, first on the blustery washing line and, later, in the hands of a customer who’s discovered just the thing s/he was hunting for. I hope my shoe-hunt has a similarly happy ending.

xxx