Page 16 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
‘I can’t… there is no… You arenotto price anything yourself,’ Phoebe said sternly. ‘It’s very complicated. It depends entirely on the dress: the era, its condition, who was the designer? Is it deadstock? What’s it made from?’
‘That does sound complicated,’ Sophy muttered. She was happy to leave that to Phoebe rather than to be punished for selling a two-hundred-pound dress for a tenner. Even downstairs, some of the price points had made Sophy’s eyebrows shoot up. You’d be hard pressed to find anything for less than fifty quid, and most of their dresses were priced between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty pounds.
‘It’s getting harder and harder to source decent vintage,’ Phoebe explained as she gave Sophy a low-down on the yellow rail. ‘It makes me so sad to think of all those poor dresses that weren’t looked after properly, then got thrown out through no fault of their own.Or worse, they languished in the back of a wardrobe for decades and when their owner died some heavy-handed oaf who didn’t know what they were doing got rid of them.’
‘Yeah, that is terrible.’
Colin, Cress’s lesser half, was fricking obsessed with music in a boring, trainspottery way. He refused to listen to his favourite albums on anything but vinyl and he would spout facts, figures and opinions for hours if you’d let him. From the evils of Spotify to how George Harrison was the best Beatle and that really there’d been no truly new or groundbreaking developments in music since 1979. Sophy dreaded getting stuck next to Colin on the rare occasions they were graced with his presence. But Colin and his boring, encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure bands from yesteryear had nothing on Phoebe. Sophy liked fashion. She liked the transformative power of a new dress. But Phoebe and her old frocks took it to a whole other level.
‘Anyway, there’s a label in every dress.’ Phoebe removed a bottle green woollen shift that Sophy was now about seventy per cent certain was early sixties to point out the handwritten label inside. ‘Not pinned, Sophy. Weneverpin. Look, it’s looped through on a ribbon and there’s the size, the price, the era and designer if we know it.’
‘About sizing…’
‘We use modern sizing. Ignore the size on the manufacturer’s label because vintage sizing is much smaller. A vintage size ten would be equivalent to a size six now.’
‘That’s just mean,’ Sophy said, putting the dress back on the rail under Phoebe’s supervision.
‘People were much smaller back then. They didn’t have access to such good nutrition as we do, or family-sized bags of kettle chips,’ Phoebe pointed out.
‘Because I always wondered… I’ve read in loads of places that Marilyn Monroe was actually a size sixteen—’
‘Fake news!’ Phoebe gasped. ‘She was tiny. I saw some of her dresses in an exhibition when I went to LA and I doubt I could even have got one of them over my head.’
‘Butyou’retiny,’ Sophy said. Not that she really wanted to get into a discussion on body size, but it was too late; Phoebe was already looking unbearably self-satisfied at Sophy’s comment.
‘It’s a trade-off. If I want to fit into the good vintage then I don’t allow myself to eat carbs or chocolate. Ever,’ she said.
‘No dress is worth no chocolate ever,’ Sophy insisted, but she didn’t want things to get frosty again when they’d been getting on so well. ‘Did you ever think of organising the dresses according to size?’ At her old shop, they’d had detailed diagrams from the merchandising team every time new stock dropped.
‘We did when we first opened but it wasn’t very aesthetically pleasing, everything jumbled together.’ Phoebe winced at the memory. ‘Then I decided to arrange everything by era but that looked messy too, so in the end I went for colour-theming. It looksamazingon Instagram.’
‘It looks amazing in real life too, but how do you even remember that you have a size twelve gold lace dress that would be perfect for a wedding if it’s all arranged by colour?’
‘Because I have every piece of stock memorised,’ Phoebe explained, because of course she did. ‘So do Chloe and Anita. Beatrice sticks everything up on the website anyway and you can set the search function to size or colour or era, but I think that’s cheating.’ Of course she did. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll soon get the hang of it. Now, shall we approach the thorny topic of accessories?’
‘Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead and leave that for another day?’ Sophy said pleadingly. She had so much new knowledge in her head that she was pretty sure it had knocked out quite a few neurons devoted to Spice Girls lyrics and the dates of all of her friends’ birthdays.
‘You’re probably right,’ Phoebe said. Clearly, the Friday feeling agreed with her. ‘But actually, there was one thing I wanted to say to you…’
Sophy tensed every muscle in her body. ‘Really? What was that?’
‘You are going to have to start wearing vintage, you know, even if it is only in work hours. Although once you start wearing vintage, you’ll never want to go back to civilian clothes,’ Phoebe said smugly. ‘I could pick out some black dresses for you, like we all wear.’
‘But I’m not going to be here for very long and also, like Britain before we Brexited, I need freedom of movement,’ Sophy said, pleased that her backbone wasn’t completely missing. ‘Those dresses are so form-fitting.’
‘Why wouldn’t you want to fit your form though?’ Phoebe asked, eyes like a barcode scanner as she stared at Sophy’s figure. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but that dress is doing nothing for you. It looks like a sack.’
‘Which other way would you like me to take it? It’s a trapeze dress, they’re very on-trend actually.’
Phoebe waved one perfectly manicured hand dismissively. ‘Pfffttt. Trends never stick around but style is timeless.’ Then she must have realised that she’d reverted to beastly type because she gave Sophy a winsome smile. ‘Just try a few things on. For me.’
Sophy really didn’t want to do Phoebe any favours, but they had been getting on so well and what harm could it do to try on a couple of dresses? Phoebe was already pulling a fifties black broderie anglaise dress from the rail. It wasn’t tight.Or rather the bodice with its boatneck and cap sleeves was, but the skirt was very full and swishy.
‘I think this would look great on you. Oh, and there’s a lovely white dress with sailboats on it, that might be fun,’ Phoebe said, eyes raking up and down Sophy’s body more thoroughly than any man ever had. ‘My God, are yousmellingthe dress?’
More of a surreptitious sniff, Sophy had thought. ‘No!’
‘You should know by now that we launder everything that comes in – and if you ask me if anyone has died in either dress, Iwillsmack you,’ Phoebe threatened, thrusting the white dress at Sophy.
