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Intentional Shopping T Community-minded, women-owned collective brings vintage adornment to Venice Beach
PHOTOS BY CHRIS MORTENSON
Nichole Katsikas founded Adorned Vintage & Handmade, a community-minded, women-owned collective located in Venice. PAGE 12 THE ARGONAUT AUGUST 4, 2022
By Marin Heinritz he definition of the word “adorn” is “to make more beautiful or attractive,” but for Adorned Vintage & Handmade founder Nichole Katsikas, it means much more than that. “The word adorned comes from the concept that dressing should be intentional and should reflect who you are and it should be magic,” Katsikas said, noting her Greek heritage and a tradition of adornment that is “aesthetic and spiritual as much as functional.” It is in that spirit that Katsikas set out on her journey to create Adorned, the brick-and-mortar vintage collective on the Westminster block of Venice. Inspired by her experience with Seven Wonders Collective in Brooklyn, Katsikas longed for the kind of supportive community in Los Angeles that she’d first encountered in New York. She’d invested in the shared rent with a rack of her own curated brand, Lola Mayy Vintage, while still working full time as a producer for The RealReal, but longed for a creative outlet and to work for herself. “I was feeling so alone and so lost, it was the best thing that happened to me,” Katsikas said. “My whole life changed and it’s so much more aligned with who I am.” The changes came fast and furious after Katsikas quit her fulltime job in December 2019 to focus more on her business and the collective. Their most lucrative month in February 2020 was followed by COVID shutdowns, and though they were able to renegotiate a short-term lease, Katsikas and her partner decided to head west in September, deliberately avoiding spending the pandemic in New York City. They packed up their Mini Cooper and pit bull and drove cross country during the pandemic, sourcing and collecting vintage clothes and accessories, a passion of Katsikas’ since she was 13 that had also become her central career focus. Within two weeks of landing in LA, Katsikas found the perfect spot to sell her collection: a 1960s Airstream on Lincoln Avenue as part of the Love Shack. She rented it for three months, and while the first two months went great, the second wave of the pandemic hit in October 2022, so she went back to the drawing board and converted her garage into a showroom that was open on weekends. “I met so many people there, that
