Once in a while, Loreta Corsetti likes to give names to the clothes she makes. There’s the Phantom of the Opera Dress, for example: a sleeveless, black, knee-length dress with fringe around the bottom, rhinestone buttons, and in the back, yards of black-and-white striped satin forming a sort of bustle like bunting at a political convention. Then there’s the Apple Dress, a narrow, black-and-white plaid wool jumper. At the neck, there’s some hand-crocheted lace, a houndstooth applique, and a red plastic apple the size of a golf ball.
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What sets their store apart from other resale clothing stores–apart from the strange-looking clothes–is the treatment the clothes get. Everything is dry-cleaned and, if need be, mended, cut and resewn, or decorated. “A lot of people come in here and say, ‘I won’t spend more than three or four dollars on a dress,’” Corsetti says. “What they don’t understand is that they don’t have to do anything to these. These are done.”
The two spent a year and a half hunting down clothes for the store. Everything they bought had to meet two criteria: it had to be unique, and it had to be in good condition. “Some of the stuff we bought still had tags on it,” Saxton says.
They worked several jobs for a while, earmarking a certain percentage of each paycheck for clothes. The two of them wallpapered the store walls and painted the floor. They bought a display case from a store that had gone out of business, and Corsetti got a free mannequin from a store she was working at. They even reupholstered a secondhand loveseat themselves.
Some of the store’s more interesting customers have included brides in search of vintage wedding dresses, a ballroom dancer looking for a dress to wear to competitions, Chicago Symphony musicians looking for black dresses–and a man in a business suit who wanted to try on skirts. “So we brought him some skirts,” Corsetti says.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
