Falkland shopkeeper Lisa Irving is finding out that thrifting is all the rage in 2024.
And as the owner of the village’s preloved and retro clothing boutique, Vintage Quine, she couldn’t be happier to see customers as young as 13 (and as old as 80) keenly browsing the second-hand rails of her shop.
But Lisa is of a fine enough vintage herself to remember that things weren’t always this way.
“I grew up in a house where everything was second-hand,” recalls Lisa, 61.
“The furniture, clothes, everything. We didn’t have a lot of money. And I didn’t mind at all, but there was definitely a stigma.”
As a young woman growing up in Aberdeen in the ’60s and ’70s, Lisa remembers days out at auction houses with her mother and grandmother, looking for cheap, high-quality furniture.
It was here that her love of all things vintage was born.
‘Everybody wanted modern but mum was different’
“Those auction rooms were my first experience of this great world where you got fabulous furniture and things for next to nothing,” Lisa explains, as we nosy around her shop, filled to the gunnels with trinkets and treasures.
She’s kitted out in a bright red, 1940s-style dress, and looks ready to steal a black-and-white screen.
“In those days, it wasn’t really the fashion to get old furniture because everybody wanted modern. People getting rid of their nice, old wooden furniture and buying MDF things.
“They boarded up their fireplaces and serving hatches, and covered up their lovely wooden floorboards.
“But my mum was a bit different. Our whole house had an eclectic feel and I suppose I continued that into my student days.”
As a teenager, emboldened by her mum’s love of classic craftsmanship and her dad’s penchant for big bands, Lisa began dressing in vintage clothing, and it was then that she discovered her love of 1940s fashion.
Dreamy dresses and furs from Nostalgia
“In those days there weren’t a lot of charity shops, they were called thrift shops,” she explains. “When I was a drama student, there was this shop in Aberdeen called Nostalgia.
“It was up a close, off Union Street, and up three flights of stairs in this attic room crammed full of stuff. And it had the most amazing collection of really old vintage. Edwardian things, Victorian nightdresses… I’d pick up ’40s blouses and dresses, and even fur coats!”
Fondly, she recalls the “fantastic” proprietor of the shop, a “very Aberdonian” lady with a knack for making sales – whether customers were looking to buy or not.
“She was a lovely woman, but she would would go: ‘It’s vintage dearie, look at the quality!’ You couldn’t leave without spending money!”
After university, inspired by the thrill of that little shop, Lisa went on to open her own vintage shop with her late mother Elma Donald.
Brief Encounter, named after David Lean’s 1945 Hollywood classic, was what Lisa calls her “apprenticeship” in the worlds of vintage, business and flying in the face of doubt.
A Brief Encounter with family business
“It was a really exciting time,” smiles Lisa. “I was the buyer and mum was the one on the shop floor with the customers. She was always styling people and dressing the windows.”
But despite the nostalgic hue of that time, things weren’t all rosy. The stigma against second-hand shops was so ingrained in society that family members shunned Lisa and her mother over their decision to open Brief Encounter.
“I had an aunt who, when we opened the shop in Aberdeen, stopped speaking to my mum,” Lisa reveals. “She said: ‘You’ve opened up a second-hand shop, what’re you doing that for?’ She was horrified!
“It was beyond her comprehension, because you were poor if you had to buy second-hand,” she continues.
“She didn’t understand what we were doing.”
After five fun years of scouring jumble sales and sourcing hidden 20th Century gems for Aberdeen’s vintage-lovers, Lisa and her mother made the difficult decision to close Brief Encounter.
“Sadly, it was the downturn of the oil at that point in the early ’90s and we were just struggling,” says Lisa.
“I wasn’t making enough money, my mum was doing it for nothing. So I said: ‘Maybe’ it’s time’. And we moved on.”
New start for old dreams at Vintage Quine
For the next two decades, Lisa worked as a peripatetic drama teacher for primary school children while she raised her young family in Fife’s East Neuk.
But she kept her shopkeeping dream stored in the attic for a rainy day, in the form of some vintage garments and furniture she just hadn’t been able to part with the first time around.
After a couple of stints selling in corners or stalls of other shops, a unit in her hometown of Falkland opened up. And though it was “a big risk”, Lisa took the leap.
In 2017 she launched her very own shop – Vintage Quine, with the Doric word for ‘woman’ honouring her Aberdonian roots.
“It’s amazing how I’ve come full circle again,” smiles Lisa. “It feels right.”
Since then, the shop has gone from strength to strength, with the quaint backdrop of Falkland ensuring regular footfall year-round.
As well as ‘true vintage’ preloved items from the 1930s onwards, Vintage Quine stocks new, vintage-style clothes, as well as homeware and accessories.
‘She said: Your mum’s here’
And though Elma passed away five years ago, Lisa still feels her mother’s presence in the ‘dress corner’, a treasure trove of authentic cocktail dresses and wedding gowns in the store’s side room.
“I had a woman in last summer and she said: ‘I used to come to your shop in Aberdeen when I was a student. I would come in and go ‘I don’t know what I’m wearing’ and your mum would go: ‘Oh, I’ve got the perfect thing for you’. And I always went out feeling fantastic.’
“This woman got really quite emotional,” Lisa recalls. “She went through to the dress room and said: ‘Your mum’s here’. She was tearful. I said: ‘Yeah, I think she is here, keeping me right’.”
Giving her quines their ‘va-va-voom’ back
Following in her mother’s immaculately styled footsteps, Lisa goes out of her way to help customers regain their “va-va-voom” when they feel it’s been lost.
She prides herself on giving a personal service that goes above and beyond the high street experience.
“We give lots of advice when we’re in the shop,” she says. “When you go into a high street store, there’s nobody to help you. And some people do need help.
“It’s about instilling a confidence in them, because a lot of women don’t have confidence. They come in and say: ‘I’d love to be able to wear vintage’ and I’ll say ‘you can, but just mix it up’.
“I’m not a fanatic, I don’t do head to toe vintage every day. I think especially when you get to my age, you can look older if you go for the full vintage. I don’t want to look like my granny!”
So what are her style tips for those looking to incorporate vintage clothing into a modern wardrobe?
“I’ll have a vintage dress with, say, a denim or leather jacket, or white trainers,” Lisa suggests. “You don’t have to do the whole hardcore vintage look. You can take it as far as you want to. That way, you don’t look like you’re in fancy dress.”
Brand new Outlander Experience for couples
However, as a “theatre person”, Lisa has an unabashed love for costumes which she’s now letting loose as Vintage Quine partners up with Fife photographer Daria Bilk to launch ‘The Outlander Experience’.
Capitalising on Falkland’s connections with the smash-hit TV series (the village was used as a filming location to portray 1940s Inverness), The Outlander Experience will offer superfans the opportunity to dress up as protagonists Jamie and Claire and have their very own professional photo shoot in the picturesque town centre.
“I’m providing hire of the clothes, which are being made by my suppliers,” Lisa explains. “And Daria will take the photos. I think hardcore fans will love it – and amazingly, nobody’s doing this.”
On the note of time-travel, Lisa admits that even though four decades have passed since she first got into vintage clothing, she struggles to see clothes from her own youth as ‘vintage’.
“For a lot of people, coming in here is like going back in time,” she acknowledges. “The young people do like the more ’80s and ’90s stuff and I laugh and think: ‘How can that be vintage? We lived through it, it was hideous!
“That said, there was one very trendy art student back in Aberdeen who was the only person I’d get in 1970s stuff for. She’d be so chuffed because that was her era and she loved it. She was very boho, ahead of her time.”
Sustainable way to give items ‘new lives’
As she speaks of days gone by, Lisa’s bold red lip often curls into a wistful smile.
A self-confessed “hoarder” with her “ever-expanding magic loft”, she wears her nostalgia and sentimentality for old things on her polka-dotted sleeve.
“I’m just a nostalgic person,” she admits. “I love old movies and old music, old cars and old furniture.
“If you believe in past lives, I was probably around in the 1940s in another life. I definitely have an affinity, or something that draws me to that era.”
But as much as she enjoys looking back, she’s also looking ahead to a future where ethical consumption is more and more vital.
And she insists that sustainability is a big part of her ethos when it comes to wearing and selling on vintage clothing.
“I always say when I’m buying an item that I’m saving it and giving it another life,” she says.
“It’ll go to someone that’ll love it again, and that’s comforting, especially when things hold memories.
“What’s the point of stuff being stuck up in an attic?”
For more information about Vintage Quine or The Outlander Experience, visit the shop’s website.
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