The eve of the
Vintage Bazaar finds me more than a little nostalgic for my days with
STUDY, a company John Tyler and I started together almost three years ago. A lot of my stuff, my taste (okay, our taste) his passion and affinity for the written word, some blind ambition, and bang: a vintage business was born.
Seems like ages ago that our first little booth had been carefully plotted––each item cataloged, priced, and packed. We asked a friend to take a load in her car, the rest was crammed into my Acura. We were so excited.
As I look at photos of this and the following markets, I think of the hours spent sourcing all of this stuff. It has been a labor of love and some pain, tears even, financial risk, joy, success. And we had only just begun. And now "we" is "I". Now Houndstooth is me, and STUDY is he.
I wonder what keeps me going, and there is a lot of grey. My day job has not gotten easier, in fact the contrary, as there have been increased responsibilities and promotions to live up to. In the last months I have sold some items I swore were part of my permanent collection. There is still a certain chair I long for, an unusually large cloche that I may never see the likes of again. In the evening after packing up I sit in the living room, and it's often stripped of its best pieces. Items that don't sell come back with a dent or scratch from the rough haul. And every time I put the room back together, the best I can, with leftover items from my inventory. And then I repeat it all again: build up the collection, pawn it off.
I am an agent of things.
To sound even more maudlin and self-absorbed for a moment, when people buy from Houndstooth they are buying a piece from an assemblage. One little piece of the whole. For this reason I do not see the point in an online store, where objects are isolated from their intended purpose against a white background. The joy I get is creating a whole environment out of found objects, and then showing it to everyone. Selling that environment, piece by piece, allows me to do it again and again.
One of these days maybe I'll get it out of my system, but until then, I guess we'll see you at the Dank?
The Vintage Bazaar
Dankhaus
4740 N Western
Chicago
Saturday, Feb 11, noon-6PM
Sunday, Feb 12, 11AM-4Pm
