On State Street, stuck between Espresso Royale and the new
Noodles & Co. is an unassuming glass door with a poster of a
girl crossing a street. She’s tinted green and decked out in
go-go boots, teased blond hair and a scandalously short
miniskirt.

That image marks the doorway to Primitive Vintage, Ann
Arbor’s newest and coolest vintage clothing store. Underneath
the sidewalk, you’ll find exactly what the girl on the poster
stands for — vintage styles waiting to be sublimated into
era-eclectic avant-fashion, retro looks ready to be recreated in
daily life, a super-cute shirt, stand-out belt or sleek armchair
that complements your existing collection — in short,
mid-century glamour that’s perfect for the ’00s.

Venture past the boom box that’s constantly blaring pure
'60s garage rock, around the corner, down the stairs — pause
briefly to check the bulletin board for upcoming rock shows —
head down the hall, and turn the corner again. You’ll meet
Casey Dawson, owner and operator of what is undoubtedly State
Street’s hippest clothing store. (Take that, Urban
Outfitters!)

Since midsummer, Dawson has provided cute dresses, totally hip
jeans, flashy accessories and sophisticated furniture to downtown
shoppers in the know — all for reasonable prices lower than
you'd find for "trendy" stuff at Briarwood. She’s usually
perched behind the sales counter, wearing one of her many chic and
unique vintage outfits.

While most of her customers are students, Dawson, 24, and her
husband Ryan, 28, didn’t discover their love of vintage style
until rather recently. “It’s been within the past
couple of years that we really got into this kind of thing and
started dressing like it. Collecting for the store only started a
few months before it opened,” she said.

“When we first started collecting for the store, we went
on all these trips out of state, searching out estate sales. My
parents live down South, so we’d go visit them and go
anywhere — anywhere you’d even take the chance to look
and see if they’ve got anything,” Dawson explained.
Since local retrophiles can search southeast Michigan for vintage
finds with relative ease, she looks for hidden fashion treasures
elsewhere: “We don’t really shop around here very
often; we try to travel and do big shopping excursions at least
once a month.”

The Dawsons became interested in vintage clothing via vintage
music. “When we got married, we decided to start the band
— we actually played at our own wedding reception,”
Casey Dawson related. “We’d gotten more and more into
this type of music. Ryan must have found some Kinks music online,
and we were really inspired by that (style) and decided to do it
… We're like 60s rock ‘n’ roll, we try to stick
to the really basic, early Who-ish sound.” They’re core
members of the Riots, a Detroit-area '60s-style rock outfit. She
plays bass guitar and sings backup while he plays lead and
sings.

“We started the band, the Riots, and got into the music
more and more and got engrossed in the whole time period. I
personally like the ’60s the most. (Ryan), too, is really
interested in jeans, T-shirts, bellbottoms [from that era].”
Casey loves British Invaders turned high-minded pop masters the
Kinks (of “You Really Got Me” fame); the Gories, a
Detroit garage rock outfit; The Who’s early mod work, like
The Who Sell Out; and retro jazz-poppers Stereolab (“for
their amazing song writing”).

Despite her relative immersion in far-out vintage styles, Casey
leads a pretty normal life. "I do corporate finance for a health
care company (as well as running Primitive Vintage) and Ryan does
computers, most recently for U of M as a contractor. He was laid
off from his job, and we said ‘Well, what are we gonna
do?’”

The solution was right under their noses — or, rather,
inside their closets. “We were really into everything from
this time period, and we had a big collection of our own, and just
decided we wanted to share it with the world,” she
explained.

But moving from corporate finance to owning a small business
wasn’t an easy transition for Dawson to make — at
first. “(It was) very, very scary, but at the same time we
knew it wasn’t anything that was gonna make or break us. If
it didn’t work out, that was cool, but we thought it would be
neat to try it.”