Elisa Casas started collecting vintage clothes when she was in high school. “Not as a serious collector,” she says, “just because I liked old things-we lived with a lot of antiques, and I enjoyed learning the history of clothes.”
She admits, though, there was a more compelling reason: “You could buy something great for $10.”
The 28-year-old did become a serious collector, however, after she moved from Queens, New York, to Manhattan to attend New York University. When she wasn’t studying photography, she was scouring the city for beautiful clothes from other eras.
“I never bought them just for the sake of collecting or kept them in a temperature-controlled closet. I wore them all the time.”
When her clothes regularly brought complimentary “Where-did-you-find-that?” queries, her boyfriend came up with a question of his own: “How hard can it be to reproduce these clothes?”
Not that hard, they found. Casas picked some of her favorite golden oldies, lined up pros with the proper technical skills to copy and manufacture them and she was in business, literally. Just over a year ago she started The 1909 Co. and produced a small catalog of “neo-vintage” clothing. Her much-expanded (32 pages) current catalog includes a wide variety of clothing and accessories (lace handkerchiefs, fabric-flower pins, jet beaded necklaces, even a velvet muff).
What the catalog offers women is the look of vintage with none of the hassles, she says. There’s no searching for shops, no wrong sizes, no alterations or repairs. Though they look antiquey, the clothes are new, so they’re in mint condition.
The No. 1 best-seller around the country (“a lot of them are going to Chicago,” Casas says) is a silk velvet opera cloak (from 1924) with an elaborately styled ruched collar and belled sleeves ($495).
Other hot items are an Empire dress with a stretch-velvet scooped bodice and ankle-length georgette skirt ($265) and a Victorian skirt (minus bustle) and a peplumed lace-over-taffeta jacket ($385).
Then there’s a wedding suit, a long, sleeveless dress, shirred above its Empire waist, and a jacket with 37 buttons, triangular-shaped sleeves and a hemline that dips from knee-to floor-length in the back, simulating a train. It’s shown in navy silk velvet, but Casas is having one made in ivory cut velvet in her size. She plans to wear it in December when she marries the boyfriend-Steve Sinclair, 40, her partner in the business-and the one who came up with the idea of reproducing all those clothes in her closet.
But at the top of her agenda is the opening of her first store this month in New York’s SoHo-“that’s always been a dream of mine”-with the aid of a $25,000 first-place “New Business Contest” award presented by New Woman magazine and the National Association for Female Executives. Winners were selected for their exceptional and original business plans and creative vision.
Casas says launching several more stores is a goal, but maintains that the catalog, now published twice annually, will remain her top priority.
“It’s what I really believe in,” she says. “It allows me to tell people about the history of the clothing, explain what it means, where it came from.”
For a free 1909 catalog, call 800-331-1909.
