Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Chloë Sevigny’s Jeans! Anita Pallenberg’s Henley! 8 Vintage Treasures From Stylist Bay Garnett’s Archive Have Been Remade

There was something wildly inventive about West London fashion in the ’90s. The legendary vintage scene at Portobello Road Market, stretching from Golborne Road to Westbourne Grove, gave birth to the seemingly slapdash high-low mix that defines good street style to this day. Now, Bay Garnett, the British stylist who helped pioneer the secondhand movement, has partnered with M.i.h. Jeans to harness that magic for a new capsule collection that goes one step further than simple vintage-inspired designs. Instead, Golborne Road by Bay Garnett is a curated selection of thrifted treasures, plucked directly from her personal archive and reproduced for the masses.


These eight perfect pieces represent the crown jewels of Garnett’s expansive vintage collection, lovingly assembled on rambles through Portobello. “It was our way of life,” Garnett recalls of thrifting back then. “It was a really genuine, lovely passion that unified us.” From her home base in Shepherd’s Bush, she would set off for model Iris Palmer’s ramshackle house on the road and from there, the ragtag crew would embark on the hunt for rare, affordable finds—a soft cotton tee covered in glitter stilettos, or the elusive pair of perfect jeans. Many of those items found their way into Garnett’s editorial work—shoots for British Vogue, the pages of her cult thrifter’s zine Cheap Date—and sparked a collective desire for a more effortless, fun-loving wardrobe. “It could be dark red tracksuit bottoms with high heels and a swimsuit—almost quite Gummo, that film with Chloë Sevigny—or it could be a beautiful vintage silk dress,” Garnett says. “It didn’t matter what, it was about your own sense of style.”

That ethos feels particularly of the moment—one reason why M.i.h. founder Chloe Lonsdale, who also lived off Golborne Road in the mid-’90s, tapped Garnett for this collaboration. “I loved how people would pull out a ’30s silk tea dress, wear it over secondhand jeans and a pair of sneakers or Dr. Martens, and add a little twist of their own—jewelry, a hat,” she says. “Bay immortalized that look—what we see now as street style was single-handedly put on the map by her. It was that attitude toward dressing that I fell in love with.”

Happily, that attitude can be snapped up with one of Garnett’s vintage reproductions. Some are exact replicas (the black chinoiserie blouse with snaking buds up the collar), while others have been updated just slightly (a fleece turtleneck with elaborate ruffled sleeves, remade in soft jersey). Each has its own special history, laid out by Garnett, below—think a velour henley the color of mink, a gift from Anita Pallenberg, or those perfect flares, worn by countless It girls like Sevigny. They may be the holy grail of secondhand shopping, the sort of perfect high-waisted denim you can’t ever find new—at least, until now.