The Getup Vintage, with its purple storefront and eye-catching window displays, is tucked between Totoro Japanese Restaurant and Taste of India Suvai on South State Street. The vintage shop has been serving Ann Arbor with environmentally-conscious fashion for 19 years. It was founded by Kelly and Paul McLeod before being sold to longtime employees Lindsey Leyland and Kaylan Mitchell in 2015.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Leyland said her love for vintage clothing and commitment to buying second-hand clothing began when she was a kid.
“I was raised by two scientists, and the environment has always been super huge,” Leyland said. “I grew up making my own clothes. My mom made her own laundry detergent. It was pretty instilled in me at a very young age, and we bought secondhand all the time.”
Each piece is hand-selected by Leyland and Mitchell and goes through an extensive cleaning and restoration process before going on the rack. Leyland said the clothes in the store are often pieces that would otherwise have been thrown away.
“We get to go into people’s homes where most of the time this stuff would be thrown into a dumpster,” Leyland said. “These are people cleaning out their great grandparents’ house, people who have come in contact with hoarder situations and are really stressed out by the situation that they’re in. Then I come in and I find that stuff … has a lot of life left in it. It does not need to be thrown into a dumpster.”
Leyland said purchasing fast fashion can be detrimental to our carbon footprint, and buying clothing second-hand is a good alternative for consumers.
“If you start digging into the environmental impact of fast fashion, there’s not any eco-friendly textile,” Leyland said. “It is one of the largest polluters on our planet. So even a small form of buying secondhand, nobody says that you have to completely never buy anything new, but if you can do the five-minute research into the brand, if you could think, okay, instead of buying this from Zara, is there something like this that I can go thrift that is very similar to this.”
The Getup Vintage regularly collaborates with the University of Michigan for workshops that show students how to repair their clothing to reduce textile waste and teach them about the importance of environmentally-conscious fashion decisions.
“We really wanted to teach young college kids, ‘OK, maybe don’t buy that Instagram thing but maybe go to a thrift store and see if there’s something like that,’” Leyland said. “Or maybe take something already in your closet and learn how to alter it to make it the thing that you want. I’m always about using what you have first before going out and trying to just buy for the sake of buying.”
In late March, The Getup hosted a clothing repair workshop in collaboration with multiple student organizations for Zero Waste Week. The Residential College club ECO Threads was in attendance, hosting one of their monthly clothing swaps as part of their mission to slow down the fast fashion movement.
Mori Rothhorn, LSA sophomore and co-founder of ECO Threads, told The Daily in an interview that working with The Getup was a rewarding collaboration because of their organizations’ shared goals and values.
“The Getup has such a unique perspective on what it means to cultivate a fashion world that is more sustainable,” Rothhorn said. “A lot of (their) practices aligned with our values of buying and selling clothes that have maybe seen better days and need to be upcycled, or could just take a little extra love.”
Rayna Mahadevan, an LSA freshman in the Residential College, told The Daily in an interview that attending the event opened her eyes to the possibilities of more sustainable clothing options.
“It’s just cool, you sometimes find things that you didn’t know you would like,” Mahadevan said. “It makes the clothes reusable instead of just sitting there or getting thrown away. It’s a risk-free way to explore clothing in a more sustainable setting.”
Leyland said the unique system The Getup uses makes vintage shopping as easy and stress-free as possible.
“I tried to organize the store by decades,” Leyland said. “All the 70s dresses are together. There’s a lot of different fun aspects to every decade and that’s what the cool thing about vintage to me is mixing and matching decades.”
Leyland also told The Daily the store offers professional measuring cards to help clients know if an item will fit because much of the clothing in the shop is made to fit the socially-accepted body type of the time period.
“It’s a little bit easier to go through and shop to find the decade that best fits your body type,” Leyland said. “There are historical reasons why clothing is the way it is in different decades so it’s about education just as much as it is the fashion aspect of it.”
Leyland said she’s always happy to talk about sustainable fashion and share the eco-friendly places she likes with customers at The Getup.
“There are so many eco-friendly things that are popping up now and companies that are being pretty successful,” Leyland said. “I feel like if we all just start sharing this information with each other, we can really start buying better and stop buying big-box brands.”
Daily Staff Reporter Abby Harris can be reached at abigailx@umich.edu.