“I carry the sort of the vintage that inspired contemporary design,” says Kym Chambers, founder of Chambers Vintage, an online vintage clothing shop with a new brick-and-mortar boutique in Saugerties. “The designs on the runway or in the magazines—a lot of the pieces that I have are, or could be, source material for that new work.”
Temporally, that means her selection of second-hand threads ranges from the 1960s to the late ‘90s and even the early aughts, from vintage trench coats with matching belts to double-breasted blazers to silk slips and Levi’s jeans. “They’re things that you could mix and match with contemporary fashion,” Chambers says. “If I was going to feather vintage into a wardrobe that had some things from Zara or wherever you shop, these are all pieces that would work.”
Brainchild
The Chambers Vintage brand was born in 2019, just a short time after Chambers gave birth to her son, Noah. She had a background in fashion and costume design, with experience in retail management and visual merchandising, and was looking to sink her teeth into something to help weather the sea change of motherhood. “I loved being a new mother, but I also needed a new project that was just for me, that wasn’t about being a mom,” she recalls. “I asked myself, ‘What do I want to do going forward?’ I had worked my way around the fashion world to land back to what I’ve loved most since the beginning: vintage.”
In October 2019, the brand was born with an Instagram account and a guest rack at two friends’ Midcentury Modern housewares shop on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. That pop-up was just ending, with Chambers about to sign a lease on a storefront, when the pandemic hit, throwing New York into lockdown. Undeterred, Chambers leveraged everything she had learned about e-commerce and digital inventory, site-building, social media sales, and online marketing at her last job and took Chambers Vintage online.
“As the pandemic picked up, I really expanded my offerings online, focusing on Instagram and how to make it easier to shop and to ship and for people to try things on and be able to send them back,” Chambers says. “The pandemic was kind of a moment where—in some ways good, some ways bad—online shopping became more of a thing. There was definitely some retail therapy happening, but there was a lot of conscious consumerism going on, too. People thinking about where they were spending their money, whether they were purchasing a sustainable item.”
Today, Chambers’ Instagram account has over 2,700 engaged followers and she still does the majority of her business online. She mostly models the clothes herself, interspersing products for sale with historical fun facts and vintage photos of fashion and culture icons. In May 2021, she moved to Saugerties with her husband and son into an old Victorian. She spent the summer building out the Chambers Vintage brick-and-mortar shop, a separate space attached to the house but with its own entrance. And on October 30, the Chambers Vintage studio opened by appointment. “A lot of folks don’t know that I’m here yet,” Chambers says. “People are kind of just discovering me—some word of mouth, some people from the city who follow me online coming up and realizing I have a studio up here.”
The shop, on Cedar Street in Saugerties, is a 600-square-foot whitewashed space with a plush sheepskin rug, wooden accents, and racks of clothing. While the pandemic rages on, Chambers is wary of walk-ins, preferring to schedule visits. “I want to keep doing appointments with one or two people at a time because it’s not really a large space,” she says. “If I felt more safe about it, I would institute regular hours, but I’m not there yet. That is a goal for the summer.” She also looks forward to hosting in-person events, like a monthly pop-up vintage clothing sale on the front porch of her Victorian home. In March, Chambers will participate in a vintage clothing and housewares pop-up in a Brooklyn loft with 10 to 12 vendors curated by Anna Gray of Club Vintage.
Pay It Forward
A portion of sales from Chambers’ selection of retro clothing, amassed from thrift stores, estate sales, auctions, and the like, goes to rotating nonprofit organizations. For the past six months, Chambers has donated five percent of revenue to the Stockbridge Munsee Historic Preservation Department. “I am on ancient Mohican and Lenape land,” she says. “Those communities still exist. They’ve been removed to Wisconsin, but here is this amazing organization that works to locate and preserve artifacts and repatriate land to their community. For myself, as a new landowner in this area, with all the historic issues around landowning, this feels appropriate for the moment I’m in.”
That is the barometer Chambers is committed to using going forward with her charitable giving—finding organizations that reflect where she is at in a given moment, what she is learning about, and what she wants to shed light on for her followers. In 2020, she donated to half a dozen social justice nonprofits, including The Bail Project, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), Ancient Song Doula Services, and Color of Change. “I was a sociology major and I come from this socialist family that is always talking about politics, equality, equity, social justice—these are all things that are super important to me,” she says. “Fashion can be frivolous, but you can also approach it in a meaningful and impactful way.”
The Chambers Vintage studio is open by appointment only. Call or email to schedule a slot.
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