Lined up for luxury

By Sammy Carter (she/her)

From vintage Juicy Couture, Guess, and Dior to surf chick chic, Welly locals were lining up down the street for this vintage pop-up and tattoo event.

Preloved Charlies and Nisa Thrifts held their first event selling their rare vintage collection at Studio Seaweed tattoo studio. The event had a queue stretching down Dixon Street from 10 am and dozens of people signing up for flash tattoos.

Preloved Charlies owner and Massey Design student Mikaela Venimore said, “I thought there’d be a queue that was enough to fill the room, not to have to hold people back.” Venimore has run her business for two years and reached over 14,000 followers on Instagram. However, she said running a business while studying is “fucked”. She said, “I’ll sit in class and work.”

Some feel vintage resellers are unethical, with the view that they take away good clothing from those who need it. Venimore said, “If you actually look at how many clothes there are, I think it’s a very narrow perspective.”

Over 100 billion items of clothing are produced each year, almost 14 items for every person. “When you actually start looking at these types of statistics, you get that this is a huge, big problem and instead of wasting your time talking about people who sell vintage, why aren’t you criticizing them [fast fashion],” Venimore said.

She had experienced criticism for her prices, but where one person wouldn’t pay, another would. “There’s a girl who was like ‘I’m not gonna pay $54 for that’ and then another girl was like ‘well, I will’.” Plus, you can’t get what she sells in the country.

Nisa Thrifts owner Annissa Greenlees got into thrifting at 15, “all my friends were like ‘that’s so gross’. Now it’s so trendy.”

Greenlees had gotten a lot of hate on her TikTok for her prices but felt there was an endless amount of clothing in the world. “What we sell is quite niche and a lot of it is branded stuff that would’ve been expensive to start with so it’s actually a big price drop.” She feels that fast fashion companies like Shein put the idea into people’s heads that anything over $15 is expensive.

Greenlees didn’t feel the need to respond to hate as others backed her up. She said, “If you don’t wanna buy it, cool. Someone else will.”

After just graduating her degree in Political Science from Victoria University, Greenlees was running her business full time. She found studying and running a business hard, “My first trimester running it, I failed two papers.”

The pop-up event was held at Hana Clough’s tattoo studio, Studio Seaweed, where over 20 people booked her for a flash tattoo on Saturday alone. The self-taught tattoo artist didn’t expect the event to get so big, “this is crazy”.

When she arrived at the studio that morning and saw the line down the street, she thought a fire alarm must have gone off nearby. What went through her mind was, “Holy shit, why are there so many people outside?”

She said the event went well because of “good intentions and good cunts that carry it”. Clough is a skating friend of Venimore and said it was amazing to see her friend’s business grow, “she’s just flourishing”. She loved that she was including other homies in the event.