An Oscar De La Renta evening dress from the 1980s at Kathleen Sorbara’s new vintage shop in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: The New York Times
“I’m such a tag nerd,” said Kathleen Sorbara, owner of the new Williamsburg vintage store Sorbara’s. “These old ones just kill me.”
The tag in question was on a black swing coat and read “Bergdorf’s on the Plaza.”
This is not Sorbara’s first venture into vintage boutiques. She owned the two popular, if tiny – 400 square feet – Chickee’s Vintage stores in Brooklyn, one for men’s clothes and one for women’s. As she grew out of them and decided to move to a new 1,000-square-foot store, she thought the time was right to rechristen her retail project.
She wanted a name that was reminiscent of 20th-century department store house labels, like Nan Duskin, B Altman, Barneys New York, I Magnin or Henri Bendel.
So she came up with Sorbara’s, at 326 Wythe Ave. Fitting for a family affair in which her sister, Caroline, is also an employee.
“It’s also a nod to my family’s history as small business owners,” she said.
“Sorbara’s Beauty Salon, my grandmother’s shop in the 1980s; Sorbara Company, my dad’s construction company in the 1990s; and Sorbara’s Market, the grocery store run by my first-generation Italian grandparents in Pittsburgh in the 1940s.”
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On a sunny morning in early October, just a couple days after the soft opening, Sorbara spotted a woman walking by the store.
Sorbara, who is 29, pointed out that she was carrying a patinated brown leather Hermes garden-party tote bag that she had bought a couple of days before.
“This is the customer that comes in once a week to see what’s new,” she said.
The store had two more brown leather garden-party totes displayed next to a white veil from the 1920s. On a rack there was an Armani scalloped underwear set in cream alongside a 1970s Chloe navy wrap skirt. There were Edwardian-era lace skirts, Courreges dresses and Margiela for Hermes blouses.
“You can get an old T-shirt at 1,000 different shops in the city,” she said.
An Oscar De La Renta 1980s evening dress in black satin was displayed in the middle of the store, paired with black Manolo Blahnik heels.
The men’s rack had Dries Van Noten sweaters and Bottega Veneta quilted jackets.
“We get comments especially from men that are happy about having a good range of sizes,” Sorbara said. “We are going after the 36-waist pants guy.”
She admitted that when she opened Chickee’s, she was a 23-year-old former model who could fit into just about anything. In the years since, she said that her hips totally changed, and her old vintage pants didn’t fit her.
“At the same time I was elevating my style and not wanting to be always so kitsch.”
Sorbara was wearing her own kind of mix of vintage and designer clothes: boots from Lemaire, jeans from the Row, a blue vintage tee with a Bergdorf cable-knit sweater tossed over it.
She grew up in Naples, Florida, and started modeling locally at 12. By 17, she was signed to the Wilhelmina agency and moved to TriBeCa to live in a model apartment.
Her initial forays into New York vintage shopping were in the backroom at Stella Dallas in Williamsburg, buying flared Levi’s that she wore with bandannas tied around her neck. At one point she had what she called “a serious collection of Edwardian blouses”.
Chickee’s was part of a vintage retail renaissance in New York after the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown that included Leisure Centre, Desert Vintage, Ending Soon, Lara Koleji, James Veloria and Chad Senzel’s Street Rack.
Other boutiques followed suit, making the Lower East Side and Williamsburg on weekends full of Generation Z shoppers looking to buy Miu Miu skirts and Patagonia fleeces made before they were born.
The old Chickee’s women’s space will be turned into a rotating pop-up of friends of Sorbara’s.
Sorbara sees it as an opportunity for small brands or dealers who don’t yet want to commit to a lease to try out New York retail. In October, Indian clothing brand Kartik Research is in residence; in November, Los Angeles vintage dealer Mothfood will be there.
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The scene has become crowded.
“Everyone and their mother is opening a vintage store,” Sorbara said. “Lately, it’s felt like New York is descending into a kind of ‘vintage hell’, which is a term I’ve heard more than a few peers use.”
“I think that after Covid, consumers and dealers became more informed about what they were selling, and there was more information available on the internet than ever,” she continued.
“Inventory has gone down, demand has gone up, and we are seeing higher prices.”
Sorbara added that she tried to make sure her prices “sit somewhere between a deal and a huge markup”.
“I like a little healthy competition,” she said. “This space is us sending the message that we are here, we know what we are doing, and we are more elevated than a typical vintage store. This is a well-oiled thing, and we hold our own.” – ©2024 The New York Times Company
