This piece is a continuation of a literary journalism excerpt from the winter quarter edition of NAR. Without further ado…
Bringing the Past Back to Life one Outfit at a Time
by Colleen Humfreville
While meeting with my T.A. for my history class, we start talking about upcoming projects, and I mention that I need to find something interesting to write about for my journalism project. “My wife, Gillian, owns a vintage store,” says Dave. “It’s really rad.”
After a few emails back and forth, Gillian and I agree to meet at her store on a Wednesday afternoon. After finding my way there with the help of my GPS, I walk down a street typical of downtown Long Beach: tiny shops, eerie liquor marts, and stores where only hookers would dare venture. However, on the corner of 4th and Cherry, there is a boutique that stands out. The store, larger than all the rest on the street, has bright blue doors that draw your attention immediately, with pink lettering above the entrance saying “Scuda”. The display windows contain billowy blouses paired with aqua polyester skirts, “hipster” sunglasses, and silver stilettos with heels at least two inches tall.
When you enter the store, it is clearly more interesting than its plain exterior. The walls are painted a bright red, with the molding and corners of the wall painted a jet black. The colors seem like they would be too contrasting, but in the store it seems oddly appropriate. The clothes are arranged by type: jackets on one rack; hats, purses, and belts against the wall; and dresses on another rack. Overall, I feel a bit overwhelmed. The store is quite spacious, but there are so many vintage items and clothes in the store that I don’t know where to start. There are clothes of every color. The first thing I notice is a high-collared red dress with black sleeves that are gathered at the end; it makes the sleeves quite poufy. It has an Asian-inspired design on the sleeves. The dress as a whole reminds me of something that came straight from the Orient. In reality, though, it used to be a moo-moo (which is essentially a potato sack). After Gillian bought it, she put an elastic waistband in the dress and made the sleeves shorter to make it more appropriate and fitting for modern fashion trends. “All you have to do is pair it with tights and the dress becomes a Long Beach staple,” says Gillian fashion-mindedly.
According to Gillian, vintage fashion can be either a personal passion or a reference point for future trends. Whether we are dressed for the workplace, or a specific subculture, how we adorn ourselves says a great deal about who we are and how we view ourselves in relation to the rest of society. So what statement does Gillian (properly pronounced “Jillian”) Fouser make through the clothes she designs?
Gillian is 5’5”, twenty-nine years old, has dark auburn hair about shoulder-length, and side-swept bangs that frame her slightly oval face. When I look at her, I’m reminded of that old standard “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” Her pale blue eyes and pale skin are such a contrast to her dark hair. When she had a pixie cut and had died-black hair, people said she looked like Liza Minnelli. “Is it because of my nose?,” she asks jokingly.
She describes herself as “emotional, romantic, talkative to a fault, very opinionated, forgiving, friendly, impatient, creative, enthusiastic, a little crazy, (or a lot crazy) and impulsive.” Gillian is certainly full of energy; maybe it’s the usual soy latte that she gets from the café two doors down from her store. When asked who she’d like to meet, she replies “me at 16.”
Gillian’s trip to the café is a regular occurrence. In fact, when I first meet her, this is the first thing she suggests. “Do you want to go get some coffee? It’s on Scuda,” she says as I hear the ca-ching of the register and she takes out a twenty dollar bill. As we walk down the street getting to know each other, she fills me in a little on Fourth Street. “If you’re looking for a human interest piece, all of the people on the street know each other. We always drop by each other’s store, even to just say hi,” says Gillian. When we walk into the coffee shop, Gillian immediately starts talking with the barista, who complains about how an eight year old was placing marbles in his mouth the other day, while his parents just stood by and watched. Some kids just take longer to grow up than others. Gillian gets her coffee and mine, and buys us both a brownie as we walk out. “They’re to die for,” she says enthusiastically.
Gillian is the co-owner of Scuda Vintage, a company that has been remaking vintage clothing for five years. Their “kitschy love affair” also extends to “artwork, house wares, music, dancing, green living, good reads, long roads, and kissing toads,” according to Scuda’s personal website. Yes, Scuda enjoys kissing toads; it caught me by surprise too. Apparently the company lives in a fairytale land.
Gillian was born and raised in Ireland; specifically, the Peoples Republic of Cork, which is built on the River Lee. She has a slight Irish accent; she tends to elongate her “a’s” and has a distinct inflection in her voice. “I don’t know how I ended up here, because I was a homebody. When I went off to college and moved up to the city” (it was only a twenty-five minute train ride), “I used to call my dad every evening. I used to cry when I wasn’t at home. And then I just left one day, to California! Dave stole me,” says Gillian jokingly.
Gillian met her husband Dave in an online chat room in ’99, “when it was cool to chat in Yahoo chat rooms,” she says with a laugh. “We met in a punk rock chat room. People were fighting about the Ramones and the Sex Pistols; about who started punk music. We were really embarrassed to tell people back then though. It wasn’t very normal back then.” Oddly enough, I’m familiar with the concept. My brother met his wife in a Radiohead chat room. Gillian and Dave have managed just as successfully. They’ve been married for nine and a half years.
Also, Gillian uses her own brand of “spanglish” when she is “inspirado.” Speaking with her feels like you’re talking with a teenager. She has on a lilac-colored sweater with a scoop neck, fitted to her body that held a child more than eight years ago. The outfit is layered with a vest on top, a vintage piece itself. “I nearly always have something on me that is from a third-world country, where they still make stuff on the loom or by hand. I love stuff that’s made by hand. I’m not into mass produced kind of stuff,” says Gillian. She has on straight leg jeans and black shoes; mary-janes with a slight heel, maybe one inch high at most. They remind me of salsa shoes when she walks, as I hear the brief, soft tap of the heels hitting the floor rhythmically as if she were dancing. Her feet move along with the beat of the music she has playing in the store. You can tell that she studied fashion design at school. “I love dressing up to go out. Other than that, I actually wear sweats most of the time. I live in leggings, or sweats, and oversized t-shirts. I only dress up to go out, and this is as dressed up as I get for work.”
Gillian lays out her desires just as simply and casually as she dresses. “You have your idea in your head about what you want to do,” Gillian says as she thinks aloud and absentmindedly plays with her coffee cup. “That’s one of the reasons I was looking for this store, because I studied fashion design. And then you go work for a company, and you end up not really doing what you want to do. You’re producing for someone else. You want to be out there doing your own thing; doing what you think is important.”
She originally worked for a swimwear company before she started at Scuda, but decided that she would rather work for herself. “I wanted to do whatever I felt like doing. I don’t really work well under other people. So I decided that I wanted to do my own designs without some merchandiser telling me what was in and what was out. So that was the point.” Creativity should not be stifled; it is, by definition, an area in which someone can think outside the box of conventionality. Gillian is no stranger to creativity, especially when she writes in her blog:
“Feeling kind of good today. I’m excited, but anxious. I’m feeling inspirado, but unable to act on it. WHY do I not own a sewing machine? There is not much that is more frustrating than having an idea fester in your head. I have to release it. Ideas fill my mind and turn into energy that can overwhelm if not acted upon. Anyway, it is still a good day. After all, inspirado is always better than no inspirado. It is the essence of life. I always hope to be inspired.”
She now owns a sewing machine that she bought from the desert officially known as the Antelope Valley. I should know how desolate it is; I’ve lived there for nineteen years. The sewing machine, on the other hand, has allowed Gillian to let her ideas flow; she keeps it at hand by her work desk in the store.
***
I wanted to see the place that fosters Gillian’s personal inspiration. Gillian takes me into the back of her store. There are clothes that have yet to be updated, and a box of used and loved scraps that she never lets go to waste. Her work desk is cluttered with these scraps, potential design ideas, and her patterns from fashion school. “I was a good student,” she says with a laugh.
“I hardly ever use patterns. I just lay the fabric out and kind of have an idea of what I want, and I just cut. If it’s a symmetrical dress, not one shoulder or something, usually I fold the fabric over to the wrong side,” says Gillian as she shows me a black piece of cloth with white daisies on it that she has been using for her latest project. “And I’ll have a white pen if I’m drawing on it on the back and I’ll draw it on to the fabric, and then go from there. If I’m being really careful, I’ll actually make a pattern. A lot of these patterns are from school. You know, you have your manikin and you get your fabric, and you drape it on. And then you fit it perfectly and you take it off and you draw the lines. Then you trace the paper over it. That’s what these are. These are all things I made in school that I hold on to that are very basic shapes. So that way, if I want to make something like this, I can use this pattern again. But it’s pretty easy to modify. If I want it to be wider, I’ll lay this down as a kind of guideline, and I’ll drape it out. But if I want it to flow more like down here, I’ll just get my rotary cutter and draw like that, and then get a ruler and kind of approximate where it should be from somewhere else. I just kind of go that way. So I use all my old patterns from school as guidelines for more fitted or approximate sizing.” The process sounds like it could take a lot of time, particularly when Gillian considers herself lazy.
She shows me a pillow that she is working on; a black pillow with a white scrap of cloth on the front, in which a delicate hand-sewn black flower resides. Pillows are just one of the items that she designs, although she predominantly works on clothing. “I’m the clothes person, so I make dresses, and I also make them into newer versions of their old selves. A lot of things that are pristine we’ll keep because people want period pieces, but a lot of times the print is amazing, you know,” as she shows me a “giant old skirt” with a shiny, metallic cheetah print. “No one is going to wear it, but come Christmas if we can fix this up into a little party dress, we’ll be able to sell it. And it’s vintage fabric, totally recycled, but new. The whole idea is to recycle as much as possible.” Going green has become a recent trend with the drive for everyone to be eco-friendly (“even though most of the stuff is synthetic and made with petrochemicals; it’s kind of ironic”); Gillian just hates to waste materials. Everything has a purpose.
Gillian didn’t start the store; rather, it seems to have found her. “The partner I have now had a little boutique in Old World in Huntington, and needed a partner since he couldn’t do it on his own. So, he posted an ad on Craig’s List, and that’s how we met. And I bought into the business. It cost me five thousand dollars just to buy in, and own half. And then, within eight months, we moved from a tiny little place to this location here.”
And quite a location it is. The building was originally two stores, so Gillian has had a lot of room to work with once she took over the store in March, and the store’s evolved since then. “We’re kind of playing it by ear, and letting it grow as we feel it out.” For instance, Scuda didn’t start off with a men’s section, so there was originally a big open space in the store where the men’s clothing is now set up. Also, there is a metallic stage in the back of the store, “so we have shows here” says Gillian cheerfully. “On the last Saturday of every month the street has an open night, and we have a band. We also feature an artist on the white wall [which had previously been used for artwork].” In Scuda’s own drive for entrepreneurial success, they promote other artists’ work while also selling their own products. Scuda, if nothing else, encourages creativity on Fourth Street, the place to go for vintage shopping.
***
Hipsters do not miss out on their opportunity to listen to the garage-bands that come to perform at Scuda every month, and this Saturday was no exception to that. You can imagine the scene: hipsters outside smoking, bright lights emanating from the store, and people making friends with strangers because they share a love of undiscovered punk-rock bands. The crowd is typical for the night, as I’m told by Dave. There are more than thirty people in the store; a stark contrast to the scene of having no customers when I first met with Gillian there. I find Dave behind the counter, running back and forth between checking ID’s and handing out free beer and wine. “I used to be a bartender from the time I was 21 until I was 27. I enjoyed it a lot,” says Dave while he whips out his pocket knife and opens the wine bottle with the corkscrew. While I’m being taught this and other “tricks of the trade,” the show finally starts.
The band is called Telomere Repair. There are three guys in the band, all of them in their late thirties. The lead singer, wearing a sleeve of tattoos on both of his arms, has sweat running down his forehead as he sings about having “no fucking regret,” while the drummer produces beats that are so loud and heavy I can’t hear myself think anymore. They remind me of a punk-grunge combination of Greenday and the Foo Fighters, except that you can only hear half the words they’re singing. Even when I can hear what they’re saying, it’s usually just the f-word over and over again. “All the songs sound the same,” says Gillian. “The sound is good, but everything sounds the same. Isn’t this the first song they played?,” she asks jokingly. Maybe the band sounds better after a few beers; people had no trouble taking advantage of free alcohol.
Near the end of the band’s performance, the hipsters are still shaking their heads in unison with the beat, tapping their feet to the music. It seemed that some of them had rhythm from their head to their toes. The crowd itself was very interesting. People would hug anyone they met, like they were old friends. It reminded me of how people would act at a hippie love festival; just combine alcohol, hipster clothing, and rock and roll.
The store is completely full; if you go to walk somewhere else around Scuda you will either run into a rock-groupie, an empty beer can, or a discarded wine glass. Someone even spilled some alcohol all over unique looking coin purses that were sitting on the glass counter. No one needs to know that the person who caused this incident was John, the co-owner of Scuda. Everything that night went smoothly though. Gillian sold a large of amount of clothing to the hipsters, and the band even got an encore from the crowd. I don’t think you’ll be seeing them with a platinum record anytime soon though, unless you want to hear about how “we’re all so fucking perverse.”
***
The stage on this occasion, though, is surrounded by a rack of colorful clothes that represent every color of the rainbow, rather than the bulky equipment that a band needs for a show. My eyes are drawn to a white floor-length gown that is running over the edges of the stage; it reminds me of a wedding dress. I quickly shift my focus back to the store though. I have no interest in the marriage market right now, and neither does Gillian. She’s already married.
Leaning up against beige curtains with butterflies of every color and size on them is a variety of artwork: some of it reminiscent of modern art, other pieces similar to the impressionistic age of Monet, and still others that remind me of cutouts from Vogue. Everything is, of course, fashionable and artsy. “The white wall used to be a full wall, so we had huge paintings for a while, but we’ve decided that we need to allot more square footage to clothing and things that sell.” There was an obvious downturn in people buying art as the economy got bad. When people have to prioritize how they spend their money, art has to go. “That was the first place to see things dropping off,” says Gillian with a hint of disappointment in her voice. When business is everything, sometimes Gillian’s personal interests have had to be compromised in order to make a profit; running a business doesn’t function on selfishness.
However, sometimes buying a key piece of clothing may be expensive – buying vintage is literally owning a piece of history. For this reason, some couture designers are seen as more than merely designers of clothing. They are high artists, such as Dior and Balenciaga, and their best work commands prices which you would expect to pay for an artwork of that magnitude. Although, Gillian – an artist herself – feels differently about the vintage items at Scuda. “We try to keep our prices really low,” she jokes while playing with her coffee cup. “We don’t want to be pretentious or off-putting, or super cool or anything. I really try to keep the shop as much like a shop that I would love to shop in. I like friendly faces when I walk in, but not someone being pushy, trying to sell me something. I don’t like people sizing me up when I walk into a store, looking at me like ‘she doesn’t belong here’. You know, we want to be for everyone. We don’t want to have a certain customer and only cater to them.” Universality is key for her; she wants everyone to be able to shop at Scuda. Personally, I don’t feel that all of her prices reflect that. The biggest offenders of an inflated price are the art that Scuda has on sale. The pieces available, some of which are the size of a large poster, range about $125 dollars. I just don’t see how someone is willing to shell out that much money for something that looks essentially like graffiti.
When I mention the reviews for the store, Gillian instantly has an opinion. Sometimes people comment on something that they know nothing about. There’s always the one person who dislikes prices, or what the store is offering, or anything that they can comment on. Everyone’s a critic. The review reads:
“Another neighborhood vintage store. Just what we need. Now I’m the type of person who appreciates classic/vintage goods, but really only get excited about it if it’s a one of a kind item at a steal of a price. By evidence of my two star review, this place does not excite me. $100 for a pair of USED white Doc Martin boots. Not one of a kind, scuffed, and way too expensive. In fact, I’m Googling ‘white doc martin boots’ as we speak and found a brand new pair for $79.99.”
Harsh words for a vintage shopper. “I know, I saw that. That bitch,” Gillian says jokingly. “She’s all ‘I could find those Doc boots online right now.’ And, I wanted to get back on there and reply but I’m like ‘no, I have to ignore it.’ Those Doc boots [that she found] were made in China. The one’s that are in our store are directly from the UK, because I bought them there,” she says as she laughs congenially. “So I wanted to tell her that they’re different because they’re actually where Docs used to be made.” A general rule of thumb: if a piece of clothing was expensive in the first place, it will most likely remain pricey because of the label and the craftsmanship involved in its production. Prices aren’t always seen as reasonable for original vintage, and that’s just part of reality. It’s something that every vintage store has to deal with.
Conveniently, a potential customer walks in looking at the clothes. Gillian instantly greets her with a friendly face, never coming across as too pushy. She seems to live by the motto ‘treat others like you would like to be treated.’
“Hi, how are you doing?”
“Good, how are you?,” replies the customer, smiling after her warm reception from Gillian.
“Good, thank you.”
“Something smells good in here.”
“Coffee,” says Gillian good-naturedly.
“Probably,” the customer says with a laugh.
Unfortunately for Scuda, the customer leaves without buying anything; maybe it was because she couldn’t find anything she liked, or maybe it was because we were talking about how business had slowed down since the economy started getting bad at the end of summer. “We’ve noticed a definite drop off,” Gillian says matter-of-factly; or in her own words, the decrease in business is “no bueno.”
***
During the week, Scuda isn’t too busy; only locals visit the shop, which isn’t too surprising after the lack of customers I saw when I went to visit Scuda. Saturdays and Sundays are the busy days. During the weekends, Fourth Street itself, also called Retro Row, is “kind of a destination for vintage shoppers from all over L.A. and Orange County, and even the Inland Empire,” Gillian says. Some people buy vintage to experience the happiness of wearing something which is both unique and has its own history; the very fact that something is vintage means everything. And because of this, Scuda “get[s] people on Saturday and Sunday that drive particularly to our street because the vintage shopping is so good down here. So those are our key days. During the week it’s kind of hit or miss. Some days are so slow that you have to make an effort to keep yourself busy. Other days it’s just kind of constant,” says Gillian. “We actually get a lot of business from Japanese tourists. The Japanese specifically come here for vintage American clothes. It’s wonderful for us, and the boys spend just as much as the girls. They are deeply into fashion, and style, and vintage American clothes. It’s the Americaness of it that’s big.” The ironic thing is that Gillian isn’t even an American citizen.
Like most Americans though, she determines her stylistic preferences for the clothes she creates on fanciful whims, with no set of style regulations guiding her way. “I like to play it by ear. I get bored quickly. If something looks new and shiny, I’ll follow it. Very often I’ll go with one idea if I would like a certain silhouette, like a certain shape will appeal to me, and I will make everything with that in mind. I kind of become obsessed with one thing at a time, which seems counterintuitive to only making one-of-a-kind things. They’re never the same, but I can become obsessed with something like frills. So I’ll have to put a frill on the sleeve or a frill on the bottom. Buttons. I went through a stupid phase with buttons where everything I made had those little sailor-style buttons,” Gillian says as she shows me another pillow that she created. It has multicolored stripes running diagonally, with a row of six blue sailor buttons running across the central diagonal of the pillow on the seam, holding it together. She places the pillow back on the shelf as she fluffs it. “So if I made shorts I would use sailor buttons,” continues Gillian. “If I made a high-waisted skirt it would have buttons. If I made a dress it would have a row of buttons with a frill. But I want other people to like it, but I don’t think about that when I’m making it, which is why I’ll make things that sell like that, or I’ll make it and nobody seems to like it. But I never make it with selling it in mind. In that respect I kind of don’t care what people think.” Gillian may not personally concern herself with how someone reacts to a piece of clothing that she creates, but for business reasons, it is sometimes necessary that she modifies what she has created. If an item doesn’t sell, she’ll change something about the outfit to make it more appealing.
Business savvy isn’t necessarily Gillian’s favorite aspect of working at Scuda; rather, she is more concerned with what is meaningful to her. “In some ways the secret to success is doing what you love to do. I’m happy doing this. I don’t think I’ll ever be a big name when it comes to that stuff. I have no desire to be. I don’t like that kind of pressure, with all eyes on you,” Gillian says as she shivers with the thought of being in the public eye. She is even hesitant to sign her name on pieces that she creates on the Scuda sale tag. “It’s a big deal for me to even sign it. For the longest time I didn’t even want to put my name on it. It makes me nauseous.” You won’t be seeing a name brand called ‘Gill” coming out any time soon to stores near you. She is more invested in the business for the sake of creating; she is not a fan of worldwide fame.
In pondering her future, this certainty is absent. “I don’t know if this is the only thing I’ll do. No, I think that would be really sad to say that this is all I want to do. I want to always be doing something that I find new. I may be here, but I’ll be changing all the time.” Gillian is not one for boredom. She’s already moved on to something new before what she used to be working on is considered last season’s trend. Maybe designing clothes at Scuda is just something she’s doing for now; there’s no telling if she’ll find something that she likes more in the meantime. Even though she loves fashion, it’s definitely not limiting her in regards to her career options. From speaking with her, it is clear that no matter what, she will pursue what she wants to, even if it means trying something completely different. No one can hold her back.
For now, though, her interest lies in creating outfits for Scuda. “There’s not much to sum it up, you know,” says Gillian. Vintage treasures can be found in the mêlée of a jumble sale, the dark musty corners of a charity shop, a vintage specialist shop or auction. “There’s so much stuff out there that just gets wasted,” Gillian says. Clothes are usually cast-off before they are worn out. “It’s kind of shocking how much stuff just gets thrown away. I think a lot of people don’t know how to restyle it for now. That’s what we do a lot of right now.” There’s always a need for someone to rework something to make it reusable, and Scuda tries to put its own stamp on things. Gillian is more realistic about the entrepreneurial endeavor though: “it kind of is what it is. We’re not really that special. We’re just us.”
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