Wearing second-hand clothing for the entire 48 years of your life must be quite an achievement. On first sight it seems quite natural: she wears a charity shop-bought Windsmoor skirt of placement print, and she puts down her coffee and stands up as she raises her arms and demonstrates the fluidness of her 1920’s ‘crepe lace house shirty thing’. She gazes into the distance as she tries to recall the origin of her belt, of which her preference is big and sporting catchwords like ‘Elvis’. The self-dubbed Accessories Queen’s eyes light up with a whimsically proud spark as she toys with her necklace and laughs: ‘This was from my shop.’
Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn and The Hep Cat all have two things in common: a sense of dated timelessness, and the influence behind the prefix of a reinvented name of the woman in question, ‘Hep’. These common denominators unite to embody what Catherine Wright is all about. She wanted a name that sounded established and old, like Selfridges. ‘Screwed up’ A Levels, three years in Paris as a nanny, an ‘officey’ job for theatre company Bedside Manners and two businesses later, Catherine Hepwright has fallen into the world of selling vintage clothing, or antique dealing as she likes to call it.
Hepwright’s has squeezed comfortably and discreetly for just over a year into a small gap of Bedford Place in Southampton, Catherine’s hometown. Passers-by won’t realise that this shop is the outcome of a bedroom eBay stint called Spybaby Vintage with her friend Donna, after they found they both harnessed beautiful old things in their wardrobes and tentatively asked each other, should we maybe try and sell some of these? ‘What started out as a bit of dabbling turned into a get-together every Monday to make listings, take photographs and measurements, answer questions and post it. The post office was just the worst.’ Opening a shop was in fact the last thing on Catherine’s mind – single-parenting two kids wasn’t exactly a compatible lifestyle.
It’s been a climb to get here to say the least, being bombarded with drama at the same time as trying to establish herself on the vintage map. She decided to go at it alone after Donna moved on to pursue her music career. ‘I was still doing this “I can’t have a shop, I can’t have a shop” thing.’ She pauses, lost in thought, before she describes both her son and daughter’s illnesses, her involvement in a car crash, ‘Not my fault, by the way’, her house burning down a mere three years ago, and yet another car accident. ‘It just went on and on and on,’ she says, laughing half-heartedly. ‘And I just thought, the only way I could do it was once a month open my little room to sell. The balance tipped, and my life became all about that. Slowly my confidence grew that opening to the general public was the way to go.’ Then there were her own battles with illness. ‘The reason I was able to become this bonkers vintage lady is because I had massive depression, massive.’ In an almost comforting way, she assures: ‘Don’t ever be ashamed of getting depression because it’s common as muck. I had the opportunity to reinvent myself, and wouldn’t have been brave enough if I didn’t have a clean slate. It’s amazing how good things can come from bad things happening. I can take energy from that kind of thing.’ That was when she finally signed the lease for the shop on the 27th September last year.
Suddenly a ringtone can be heard. She doesn’t even flinch. ‘Shut up,’ she tells it. ‘Sorry, this is twitter twittering away here. Do you have twitter? Come on you should, if you don’t have twitter you’re nobody. I get more laughs out of twitter than anything.’ As a non-Twitter user I do now feel rather inadequate.
Growing up as a child of the 70s when the Sex Pistols were around, just beginning to find her fashion feet and starting from the onset as a vintage wearer, she would get the paper on a Friday and attack the jumble sales with her friend Maggie, riding home on her bike with bin bags full of gems. She was a healthy size 14, which was big at the time. ‘I wept buckets because I wanted to be a Miss Selfridge girl.’ She now disregards size labels. ‘Try it on. Every day I hear women say: I’ve got a big bum, so I’m wrong because the garment’s right. It’s madness.’ High street shopping is a thing of myth for Catherine, ventured only, if ever, to see what her competitors are doing. Even despite that she dismisses inspiration, although Iris Apfel’s stark individuality is a characteristic she admires, and she was satisfied by a recent endeavour to assess Patricia Field’s boutique in New York, seeing that it wasn’t much different to hers.
The counter in her shop previously lived in her sister’s sitting room. ‘It’s always my way to think not what I can buy, but what I can use.’ The price labels on her clothes are made, I think very cleverly, from playing cards, justified by the fact that there’s enough wasted cardboard in the world so she might as well use what we already have.
Given that she’s been through hell and back to get where she is now, you’d never guess it. Sitting here, larger than life, I can see she has a real passion and dedication for what she does, and it’s not by any means the dead end of her career. She hopes to sell the shop at the end of the five-year lease, admittedly her longest commitment, ever. Does she have any regrets? ‘I kick myself for not being brave enough. It takes a long time for me to take a step. I suppose it was a fear of getting it wrong but now I realise there’s no such thing, it could be wrong today but you can correct it tomorrow, it’s all a journey. It’s more important to take a step than sit there going oh it’s not right. For anyone who’s been through trauma, the bad times give you something to compare the good times with.’
