Tailor Karlee Slater looks the perfect lady, hair set, vintage dress sitting just right, perfectly lippy’d lips, polished shoes, the whole shazam. So it’s somewhat of a surprise that she used to contribute to Street Machine and every so often fossicks through a musty fabric warehouse in Melbourne city for vintage fabrics. “It was used as a store house during the war. It’s like a treasure trove of filth,” she says. “Every couple of months I go in there in a jumpsuit and a dust mask and find what I can and then I get all the fabric dry cleaned.”
The best of the retrieved fabrics are incorporated with new threads into some of Karlee’s hand-made vintage-style suits and dresses. At Golden Age Vintage Karlee does tailoring, the old fashioned way, with padded lapels and all the trimmings so her pieces will last the test of time.
This article first appeared in triple j mag.
