TAMPA, Fla.
Multimedia
I AM a habitué of vintage-clothes shops, and while on vacation here recently, I checked out Sherry’s YesterDaze Vintage, a consignment shop in the Seminole Heights neighborhood that a friend had recommended. I was looking for a dress for Valentine’s Day, and after rummaging through racks of them found three candidates: a white 1970s minidress with flower appliqués and puffed cap sleeves; a black 1960s A-line number with a delicate velvet bow tied under the bust; and a slinky backless blue knit dress that looked as if it had been wrapped around a Studio 54 disco queen.
After trying on each dress, examining zippers and seams and checking for stains, I went with the Studio 54 ($48.15).
“Where did this come from?” I asked the cashier.
She said: “I have no idea. We never know what’s going to come through the door.”
Tampa can be a pass-through city — an airport on the way to the white sands of Sarasota, spring training in Clearwater, a cheap entryway to Orlando.
It’s more than that for tourists who don’t rush through. It’s a place to find hand-rolled cigars and cups of café con leche at King Corona Cafe, for tapas and chilled glasses of Spanish wine at Columbia Restaurant. It’s a place for lazing in the shade of Old Hyde Park’s gnarled champion trees and long nights of Irish whiskey and music, but only if you know exactly where to climb the narrow stairs up to the James Joyce Irish Pub.
For those who enjoy the thrill of the hunt the Tampa area, with roughly a dozen shops, also has a flourishing vintage fashion scene. Sherry’s YesterDaze Vintage along with La France and Squaresville Vintage Clothing & Retro Home Décor have become tourist destinations. The market is largely driven by the snowbirds who bring their clothes with them when they move South and a younger population with the cash and interest in buying those clothes.
Yes, Tampa is in Florida, but it’s less stodgy and more eclectic than some of its neighbors. This is not Boca. “Tampa is a kaleidoscope of cultures,” said Gary Mormino, a professor of history at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. “It’s a mirror of the South now, which has changed dramatically because of Yankee migration, but it also has that heritage of 19th-century Creole culture.”
The center of that Creole culture — a Cuban and Italian mix, is Ybor City. That’s where Cuban immigrants set up cigar rolling shops in the late 1800s, and where Jill Wax opened La France in 1974. She started with the one store, then expanded to two. She has four streetfront windows with constantly rotating displays: colorful Victorian corsets and feathered hats for Gasparilla, Tampa’s annual pirate festival parade; a 1920s safari scene with palm fronds hung across the wall as backdrop to a mannequin wedding couple.
Inside, cases of costume jewelry glitter under soft spotlights. A gray gown with 1930s draping stands atop a rack of 1940s swing dresses, bowing to the man’s 1960s skinny suit on the wall.
“We’re fortunate to have a big shift in the older generation that tends to move to this area and brings their favorite things that they couldn’t quite give up yet,” Ms. Wax said. She buys her items from estate sales and private sellers, and never goes far out of the region for the buying. For three years she’s worked through one estate from a turn-of-the-century clothes and textiles collector who had retired in St. Petersburg. She had so much from that estate that she opened a second store two years ago — Jezabelle and Her Wandering Gypsies, also in Ybor, where she sells vintage textiles, fabrics, crocheted doilies and ribbons.
Craig Greabell started in vintage by working at La France. He opened Squaresville Vintage in the Soho section of Tampa in 1998. “It’s like a museum without a cover charge,” he said.
Where Ms. Wax’s store is a homage to older, elegant wares, Mr. Greabell focuses on popular retro furniture and clothes from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Midcentury modern tables, chairs and lamps vie for attention and space with platform shoes, peace sign earrings and “Star Wars” T-shirts. Platform shoes in silver and gold, and black plastic heels that could hold a goldfish, top racks of vintage shirts with oversize lapels or ruffles.
Most of those shoes are new, exaggerated versions of the vintage white leather loafers and black ankle-high men’s boots in a corner of the store.
“You can’t find shoes from the ’50s in a size 14,” Mr. Greabell said.
It’s the kind of place where Tony Manero could walk in and recreate his “Saturday Night Fever” look — in a size large enough to fit him after 33 years, a mortgage and 2.5 kids.
Mr. Greabell haunts flea markets and yard sales and resells what people bring to the store. Lately he’s been going through leisure suits bought from men who retired in the Tampa area and brought the suits with them from Michigan, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Baby boomers cleaning out old clothes is what Sherry King, the owner of Sherry’s YesterDaze, relies on. “It gives me a wealth of great stuff, what walks through that door,” she said. “Every day is like Christmas.”
Like Ms. Wax and Mr. Greabell, Ms. King got her vintage start in Ybor. After trying antique malls, she ran the Ybor City Vintage Clothing Show. That show is defunct, but it lead her to open Sherry’s YesterDaze in 1998.
It’s a charming shop packed wall to wall, rack to rack with vintage clothing, highlighted by accessory displays on the walls: silver owl pendants, bright plastic flower brooches, men’s straw hats, and clutch purses so proper that they must be held by hands sheathed in white wrist-length gloves.
Ms. King only sells vintage and all on consignment, so her stock depends on what other people are trying to sell. Right now that’s a lot of 1980s cocktail dresses and winter clothes.
In addition to locals Ms. King sells to tourists and to out-of-town buyers through Etsy, a Web site (www.etsy.com/shop/yesterdazed) for handmade and vintage items to market winter items that migrated to Tampa with their owners.
She pays local models in store credit and lets them create outfits she advertises online. She relies on the fashion forward 20- and 30-somethings to create looks that work now out of her vintage stock.
“I’m not going to force somebody into something they don’t want to wear,” Ms. King said.
I paired the slinky, backless blue dress with 21st-century gold hoop earrings and pink suede booties for a Valentine’s Day dinner in Minnesota. It now hangs in my closet in New Jersey. Maybe it will migrate back to Tampa someday.
If You Go
WHERE TO SHOP
La France, 1612 East Seventh Avenue, (813) 248-1381
Squaresville Vintage Clothing & Retro Home Décor, 508 South Howard Avenue, (813) 259-9944
Sherry’s YesterDaze Vintage, 5207 North Florida Avenue, (813) 231-2020; yesterdazevintage.com.
WHERE TO STAY
Don Vicente de Ybor Historic Inn, 1915 Republica de Cuba; (813) 241-4545; donvicenteinn.com.
Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel; 700 South Florida Avenue; (813) 221-4900; marriott.com.
Saddlebrook Resort Tampa, 5700 Saddlebrook Way, Wesley Chapel; (800) 729-8383; (813) 973-1111; saddlebrook.com.
WHERE TO EAT
Columbia Restaurant, 2117 East Seventh Avenue; (813) 248-4961, columbiarestaurant.com.
Bern’s Steak House, 1208 South Howard Avenue, (813) 251-2421, bernssteakhouse.com.
Four Green Fields, 205 West Platt Street, (813) 254-4444, fourgreenfields.com.
