>> Woohoo! Two posts in a row starting with complaints about shitty flights. Well, after much delay, I'm back in town after my very very short jaunt to Florence for Pitti. I have lots of Pitti bits and bobs to post up that are neatly stacked up in the form of business cards, lookbooks and sneaky snaps on the sly (alas, tradeshows are not the most camera-friendly places in the world...). First up though, I'll go all superficial and do the usual "Here's what I bought!" thing. To be honest, I didn't really expect to be spending any money whilst out in Florence given that there's a delish press restaurant at Pitti to feed me and I wasn't there to gander the streets shopping.
However, in the Pitti W tradeshow, the womenswear contingent of the Pitti Immagine, despite it being much smaller than its male counterpart (Pitti Uomo is quite literally the Disneyland of menswear tradeshows...), they had a very interesting vintage section where you can shop, much like the vintage fairs that we have here in Battersea or Chelsea. It was here that I discovered Venturino Vintage (no website I'm afraid but Google yields an email address) whose stand, I went through like a manic haberdashery-hunting tornado. It's based in Asti, near Turin in Italy and sells a mixture of old textiles, scarves, deadstock buttons, trimmings and generally, anything that has an interesting textile treatment to it be it a piece of beaded embroidery, a delicate bit of lace, a flocked velvet applique or raffia embroidered grosgrain. These delicate scraps are strapped to white boards so you can flick through them and see everything clearly without rifling through piles of things and are priced individually. Some of these seemingly insignificant scraps of material sized 10cm x 10cm are priced at around the EUR100 mark but it's down to the age and the unique treatment of the scrap in question.
I had a colleague with me who had to leave me to it to rifle through Venturino Vintage's selection. I think I may have said "I'll be five minutes" when it was more like half an hour. It's basically a hyped-up version of The Shop on Cheshire Street which I also love for its random bits and bobs except at Venturino, my eyes were super wide because everything I saw, despite the vintage origins, I could see in a contemporary context, augmenting a piece of clothing and changing it completely.
I've been working on a slowburning DIY project which has given me much practise in handsewing that will come in handy (ahem) with these bits and bobs that I picked up at Venturino Vintage... where they will go, I don't know yet but they'll find a home somehow...
