HEAVENLY CREATURE
One of the original Instagram vintage sellers, LA-based Stacey Nishimoto has applied her handle on the past to a wistful new line of dresses. By Alice Birrell.
WHEN STACEY NISHIMOTO skipped class in school, she didn’t know it would set course for her career. “I would hide in the library and read about fashion history,” she says, remembering the worlds of women like the 1930s flappers, who would use the soot of a freshly extinguished match to create their doleful pencil-thin eyebrows. “I went home and locked myself in the bathroom and started lighting matches,” she recounts after one visit. “My dad walked by and smelled something burning and he was banging at the door yelling. I was so scared – as if I was caught smoking.”
For Nishimoto, the thrill of breathing life into the past led to her future. Now the LA-based owner of the tightly curated vintage offering The Corner Store is working on her second offering of upcycled dresses, made from Italian linen and cotton eyelet. The prairie dresses are all one style: a Victorian, pie-crust collared dress named Nina, after her grandmother. (“A powerful dress is all that you really need,” she says.)
Nishimoto can count FKA Twigs among her label’s fans. “Never in a million years would I have ever imagined that we would meet, that she would be customer and a friend,” she says. “When I used to shoot the vintage on myself to sell on Instagram, I would listen to her music in my loft and it literally uplifted me and inspired me to be as creative as I possibly could be.”
Her self-styled world pulls from the world of 80s and 90s interiors, David Bowie and “short-term obsessions” like knee-high socks with 60s baby-doll smocks, or letterman jackets of the 1980s worn over long Laura Ashley dresses. Having worked doing makeup at Chanel counters, she does the theatrical make-up, as well as casting the models herself, contacting them by DMing them on Instagram. A shared love of her dreamy imagery and otherworldly pieces has drawn a community of followers who leave a flurry of admiring comments on her feed. “I totally have maintained a sense of closeness with my customers from the very beginning; most of them have become dear friends,” she says. And it goes beyond selling dresses. “Closeness is very important me: it means community, it goes above selling and buying and capitalism, it is women supporting women.”
Her advice if you miss out on the ultimate vintage piece, or indeed one of her in-demand Stacey Nishimoto dresses? “I don’t believe in attachment. There will always be another beautiful dress; let it go. Resell, reuse, reduce … on all levels, sustainability is at my core.”