INTRO

I’ve been meaning to start a blog like this for a while now, so I thought what better time to make things happen than January. 

I’ll start by introducing myself, I’m Nicole, currently 22 years old and I live with my boyfriend Dan and my deer ornaments in a sweet little one bedroom flat in a place called Herne Bay on the south east coast of England. There’s a small patch of sea that I can see only from where I’m sitting and that makes me very happy.

I haven’t always lived in England, I was born and raised in Malta where my dad is from and lived there until I was twelve, when I moved to a place called Canterbury with my mum and younger sister. I now work in Canterbury in a shop called Third Eye which sells band merchandise and alternative clothes and accessories. There is also a vinyl section at the back of the shop and a tattoo parlour and piercing studio upstairs. 

I like my job and being surrounded by music lovers and scene kids everyday, it keeps me in touch with street style of the youth of today, and also with the past- I have always loved old music of the fifties through to the eighties and have collected records since I was thirteen, which was a weird thing for a kid to do anyway, especially without a record player which I finally got for my sixteenth birthday. I loved the images and graphics on the record sleeves and the feeling of holding a piece of history, items older than me. This was around the same time I began a love affair with vintage clothes. The charity shops which I would scour for ages, to the dismay of my friends, connected me to a fantasy world in which I could only imagine what it was like to live in times gone by.

These meccas of unwanted goods were minefields to me, there is this excitement I get to know that you could come across almost anything if you were in the right place at the right time. Something that is unwanted by it’s previous owners but is potentially treasure to you. Treasure that you could, yourself, buy with the limited pocket money provided in your early teens. 

I’ve bought all sorts of shit from charity shops. It would peev my mother no end to see me return home beaming from a Saturday in town with my best friend with some bulging miscellanious carrier bag full of, what I can now confirm, was sometimes, junk. I once bought an 80s skateboard because I thought it “looked cool” and had these wacky graphics on it. Infact I bought two. The next time I saw an orange one with “NightMare” emblazoned across the grip tape I had to buy it, I reckoned I had some sort of rad collection going on. God only knows where those skateboards are now, but they made me so happy at the time, and served their purpose as props in mine and my best friend’s Myspace photos.

Nowadays I know exactly what I’m looking for. Actually, with vintage shopping you never know what you’re looking for until you come across it, there’s always that element of chance. But with years of practise, I now know what I’m not looking for, and that’s really the key that prevents you from becoming a hoarder and buying loads of rubbish you don’t really need and wont wear. In this blog I’ll be filling you in on my vintage shopping experiences, throwing in a few tips along the way. I hope that you enjoy my musings and might be inspired to get in on the thrill of shopping for pre-loved stuff, clothes that tell stories and are unique. You don’t need to follow the crowd and trends to look good, for real  style is classic and will never go out of fashion.

xxx