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Updated 48 Days ago
A Look at Vintage From a Rookie's View
There are times when I stand in front of my closet and can't find anything to wear; I hate everything, I'm uninspired and nothing fits right. But whenever I start to get bored with my wardrobe, I turn to a couple of gals who have not only experimented with non-mainstream looks, but they've gotten it right.
I hate to admit that I take tips from a 16-year-old, but I admire the approach that this girl in Texas takes on what to wear. This New Yorker has a different look, but it's still fun to check in on. Soon after I became a repeat-reader of their blogs, I noticed that these two fashionistas incorporate a lot of vintage into their outfits.
I had no clue where to find vintage clothing in the area - probably because I hadn't looked before. So I made a huge rookie mistake; I Googled vintage clothing in St. Louis. It seemed like a good plan, until the first three places I stopped by turned out to be more Plato's Closet than classically old pieces. As I sat in my car with my laptop propped up on the steering wheel, I decided to make a few calls before wasting more gas. One was closing, one was an hour away and another only sold two-year-old clothing (which in case you didn't know, isn't vintage).
Finally, I stumbled upon Alice's Vintage Clothing in the Loop. The store doesn't have a website, and I've driven by it numerous times without going in. But as soon as I stepped foot inside the "Casual to Couture" store, I knew I had found an authentic vintage clothing store. It smelled like mothballs and wallpaper glue, but when you're trying to find a dress from the 1920s, that's considered a good thing.
Jennifer Stauber, who took over the store when her Aunt Alice passed away, has taken great care to find pieces circa 1880-1970 that are in good condition. "Come with friends when you have time to try things on and be creative," Jennifer advised me. "People don't realize that many things in the market are styled after the real thing (vintage), which is usually better quality."
Check out the Gallery tab for a look at the different jewelry and clothing articles that I found in the store.
This cream-colored shift dress (right) with a beaded neckline is a classic piece that will never go out of style. This piece from the 1960s, which will be more unique than what your friends are finding at the malls, is being sold for only $40.
Besides the racks of clothing, Alice's boasts a plethora of jewelry. I naively didn't know what Bakelite jewelry was, but after learning more about it, I'm not as shocked by the price tag - $48-55 for one plastic bracelet!
If you're not exactly looking to change up your style, Alice's offers a lot of authentic period pieces that would work great as Halloween costumes. This bright-red flapper dress (below) is $85, and you'll get points for not wearing a skanky, synthetic version to your costume party.
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.