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Jessi Sader bounds through the door of Vicki’s 2nd to None, a resale shop in Ellsworth, and makes a beeline to a sheer black dress hanging on the wall.
“Look at that,” she says, quietly. “That’s killer. That’s 1930s.”
An onlooker asks, “How can you tell?”
Sader, her caramel-blond hair pulled back in pigtails, turns and smiles.
“I’m a pro.”
For the 31-year-old Orono designer, vintage is her business, and business is good. One look at Sader and it’s clear she has a passion for fashion. On this day, she’s wearing tall shearling boots, designer jeans, a black cashmere sweater and a Louis Vuitton belt. But when she’s on the hunt, modern apparel is the last thing on her mind.
She scours thrift shops, estate sales and antiques malls for Victorian lace, silk flapper dresses and anything cashmere. Some she’ll sell as-is in her eBay boutique, Faeries Witches and Familiars. The rest will be remade into a fresh, sexy camisole or a modern hat and mittens, which she sells as far away as Japan and as close as Ampersand in Orono.
“There’s a lot of vintage that’s historically nice, but not very wearable,” Sader said. “I make it wearable.”
In the living room of her Orono home, a mannequin models an ethereal French lace slip dress with a hand-crocheted yoke. On her kitchen table, a floaty, moss-green camisole with a gold-beaded applique, pieced together from the pristine ruffles on an otherwise tattered dress, awaits a needle and thread.
Piles of pre-1950s textiles – curtains and tablecloths, dresses and shawls, furs and leather – fill her living room, surround her desk and cramp her basement. She needs it all. Aside from the three boutiques in Japan that carry her camisoles and her regular vintage clients, she has enough demand from her online business to make a living from it.
When inventory gets low, she pulls out her scissors and sewing machine and creates something fabulous.
“There’s plenty of people out there who deal in vintage clothing and textiles,” Sader said. “It’s a different dynamic when I’m doing it for fashion’s sake versus someone who’s doing it as a collectible.”
Sader subscribes to 10 fashion magazines, which allows her to stay ahead of the curve. When fur trim returned to vogue (and Vogue), she unloaded her supply of vintage capelets. Once it started popping up everywhere from Neiman Marcus to Target, the boom was over. Now that lingerie-style A-line camisoles are hot, so is demand.
“I do kind of stick to trends,” Sader said. “If I can make it, I’ll whip it out before it becomes mainstream.”
Making clothes is nothing new for Sader. While studying at the University of Maine a decade ago, she sold patchwork dresses on campus to earn a little spending money. When she ran out of cash on a spring break trip, she peddled her wares on Bombard Street and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. When she returned, she sold hippie garb to kids hanging out in Bangor.
“Then I mellowed down a lot and became more domestic,” Sader said.
Raising her daughter Nixie, now 7, made her long for something more dependable, and for several years, she ran the now-defunct Past Lives Boutique, which sold vintage and new apparel in Orono. Her eBay business has allowed her to earn a living doing what she loves – on her terms.
“It’s a dream, but it’s something that can be done for business purposes, as well,” she said.
Though she sold plenty of wild ’70s polyester shirts and mod fashions from the ’60s in her shop, her online business has an earlier focus.
Sader specializes in pieces from the 1880s to the 1950s, for resale and retooling, which allows her to be more discriminating on buying trips.
To be discriminating, a buyer must have “the eye,” and Sader does.
Cheri Valle of Mission Viejo, Calif., is a fashion historian who holds one of the country’s largest collections of pre-1900s clothing. She considers antique apparel to be a personal way of understanding the way people of that time lived.
Valle counts Sader among her most trusted sources, and recently bought a Civil War-era, white cotton boy’s dress with intricate hand-embroidery and soutache trim. It was quite a find.
“I expect that Jessi has to wade through a few hundred children’s dresses from the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s to find one Civil War-era child’s dress,” Valle said. “The skill lies in not buying things that don’t have value.”
On her Ellsworth-area buying spree, Sader dismissed several attractive but common nightdresses at the Old Creamery antiques mall. But she paused as she picked up a white nightgown with a pale pink silk ribbon.
“Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh!” Sader exclaimed, hopping up and down.
She looked at the gown’s price tag and mulled a small stain on the front. “This I think I can get out. You can’t put silk in OxyClean, so I have to deconstruct it.”
At any given time, Sader has her bathtub, washing machine, pots and pans full of fabric soaking in the peroxide-based bleaching agent. It whitens without weakening the fibers, and makes it possible to resell fabrics from the 1910s and ’20s that would otherwise end up in the trash.
Her recycled cashmere hats and mittens, refashioned from sweaters with a small moth hole or an unflattering cut, also give new life to castaways.
“There’s so much ugly, random cashmere out there, but it’s so soft,” she said.
Softness is why a young boy recently bought some of Sader’s cashmere goodies as a present for his mother at Ampersand in Orono.
The low (around $10) price tag didn’t hurt, either.
“The first day she brought them down I sold out of mittens,” Roberta Bradson, the store’s owner, said recently. She’s now on her fourth batch of Sader’s accessories. “She’s just incredible. … People think this is unique so they buy it.”
Each piece truly is unique, which is part of the allure for Sader. Prowling the racks at thrift stores and sifting through boxes of old things is like a treasure hunt.
“You know when you’re small and the best thing in the world is getting into a trunk of grandma’s clothes and dressing up and putting on all her furs?” Sader asks. “That’s my job.”
Jessi Sader’s designs are available locally at The Store-Ampersand in Orono and online at the eBay store Faeries, Witches and Familiars. She is always buying clothing and textiles. For information, call 866-2262.
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