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Catherine Wright

Hidden away on a simple street in Bedford place nestles treasure trove of clothing which almost oozes history. Outfits from as far back as the 1940s each hold their own story and you can spend hours sifting through them wondering which to take home and continue the story. The Hepwright vintage shop has become a mecca for all fashion students in Southampton and owner Catherine Wright is giving back to the students who boosted her shop by helping with the new Re:So shop, something which most people would view as competition.

On the 2nd of December Hepwright joined up with Re:So to create the ‘So Very Vintage’ day which included a live fashion shoot and tutorials on how to customize clothing. It also included the chance the buy some of Catherine’s pieces from her store. While I rifled through some of the unsold pieces she told of how important each item is to her, “they’re like my children! I feel like I have to find a home for each one of them!” Her outfit for my visit was a lot louder than most things found in the shop but not quite as loud as her personality, she wore denim dungarees with a yellow scarf, turtle shell rimmed glasses and a shiny silvery pink bag but her current but it seems that she can’t make up her mind as to what her favourite item is, ‘at the moment it would have to be a white fox fur wrap that almost touches the floor. It’s from the 1920’s and it’s very Hollywood glamour which is what I always love, but that has to go and find

a home, I’m thinking maybe a winter bride would love it”. The reason that she is very fond of fashion, particularly vintage fashion, is that she believes there are plenty of beautiful things in the world and “we really don’t need to keep creating new beautiful things”.

Can she possibly see herself running the Hepwright shop for a while? “I simply wanted to create something that I could build up and sell for a profit but now people come into the shop and tell me how much they love it.” Though to actually still seeing herself owning the shop in the future does not seem very likely, “I have to shop for five years but that’s a long time. I have never committed to something that long. And you can never predict the economy so who knows how this will end up?”

Unpredictability is something that Catherine has had to face many times over the years. Catherine has two children born 10 years apart with the second one being “a little bit of an accident” and soon after her eldest, her son, was ill and included lots of hospital visits which meant that she didn’t have a full time job during those years. So, in need of extra money, she and a close friend started selling some of the clothes they bought in charity shops and car boot sales on ebay but soon the popularity grew more than they ever could have expected so started using the basement of a second hand book shop to store their clothes. Soon people started coming in asking to buy the clothes and thus they opened

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Hepwright, much to Catherine’s scepticism. “I was a single parent with two children and no work prospect, the idea of putting my money in a vintage clothing shop seemed crazy.” But it was an incident when her house burnt down after a fire started in her daughter’s bedroom three years ago which pushed her into actually selling her clothes in a shop instead of just on ebay.

Catherine realized that the shopping district in Southampton was missing something, though she didn’t quite understand what. There were hardly any independent boutiques in Southampton and Catherine was originally worried that no one would like her “odd ball” way of viewing things and that she thought that maybe she should change her shop and how she did things to be more “sleeker” so as to compete with the chain shops such as Topshop and Urban outfitters. “Everyday people tell me they are so glad that my shop is here because it’s something different compared to the boring shopping of Southampton, we provide something different for people.” Also different to the high-street is the fact that she will never arrange her clothes by size as she hates any talk of different sizes, she believes that it is the way that the high street shop are putting us into “their” categories and we should simply follow them. Her outfits are also not aimed at a certain age category, Catherine now has a range of customers which stretch to all ages from 15 and 16 year olds all the way up her

“old grannies” as Catherine calls them, “they are obsessed with my clothes!”

“There’s no magic used to make the shop the way it is”, she says while giving me quick tour of the shop while showing me some of her favourite pieces, “we are just exactly what people are looking for, something different.” She says that she gets to know people when they come to shop so that she understands what it is that suits her customers so that they may take it back with them and start to create a new story for with a piece of history.