The Vintage Fashionista

Nancy Bordine's passion for bygone fashion

Nancy Bordine has worn many (stylish) hats over the years—foster parent, psychiatric nurse, author, teacher, quilter, and collector of vintage clothing are just a few of them. It’s that last one that, no matter her day job or latest interest, has always stuck.

Bordine says she’s had thousands of pieces cycle through her collection—“dresses…and coats and hats and gloves and slips and jewelry and belts and scarves and hair accouterments”—along with countless old photographs and fashion magazines.

She took that passion (and that collection) and created vintage fashion shows that served as fundraisers for a Traverse City history museum. She created historical presentations and gave lectures on historical and vintage fashion. She even taught a course through Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) on women’s roles in society through fashion and still leads similar programs through the Grand Traverse Historical Society.

The Collector

Bordine’s appreciation for the older, finer things in life started in the 1960s, when her mom would bring home frilly prom dresses from the ’50s found at the church rummage sales. Bordine, her sisters, and the neighbor girls would entertain themselves for hours playing dress up and throwing each other pretend weddings.

Then, while Bordine was in college, her mother inherited a huge collection of vintage clothing from an aunt, full of rich velvets and incredible fabrics. Bordine’s mom put on fashion shows in the community to showcase these pieces—you can see where she gets it!—in which Bordine and her sisters were the models.

But it wasn’t until a trip to San Francisco in 1983 that Bordine began her own collection. Her older sister took her to a vintage fashion store, and Bordine recalls the finely tailored gray wool suit she bought that day, the first piece in her collection and her “prized possession” at the time.

After that experience, she was hooked, going to thrift stores at any opportunity she had to scour for unique and vintage fashion. Some time into collecting, Bordine visited an estate sale, where she found a huge truck full of clothing from the previous decades. Since then, she searches for estate sales wherever she is to go hunting. (The trick, she tells us, is to find an estate sale with a handwritten sign. That way you know the family is organizing the sale, not a company, which means better deals on items.)

Bordine opened a booth at the Antique Mall in Traverse City, where she worked a few days each month selling her fashion finds. “I would dress up in a vintage outfit, each item with price tags on it, and put my show-stopping items in the front to draw people in,” she says.

The Way We Wore

She began working with the Con Foster Museum (now the home of the Bijou Theatre) when a coworker at Munson recommended her to outfit the mannequins for a display. The museum needed vintage bathing costumes, and Bordine was just the gal to supply them. She began costuming displays on a regular basis, working with the curator to enliven the dioramas with clothes and accessories.

When the museum approached her about putting on a historical fashion show for the community fundraiser, Bordine enthusiastically agreed, but realized she might not have enough stock to cover the full timeline of Traverse City history. She put the word out that she was looking for clothing from Traverse City throughout the decades, and people emerged from all corners to fulfill her request. Women brought their outfits they had worn to events in the town’s history, men brought old work uniforms, and the fashion show came together.

The show, titled “The Way We Wore” (named after the first vintage store Bordine visited in San Francisco!), became an annual event with new themes each year, such as “The Way We Wore to Go To Work,” “The Way We Wore to Go Outside,” and “The Way We Wore to Go to the Wedding.” As the years passed, the fashion show got bigger and more people got involved. Bordine started receiving pieces of vintage clothing on her doorstep, left anonymously, from those who wanted their old clothing to go to a good home.

Her collection, which had once come from thrift store finds, became full of donations. Women downsizing into smaller homes would bring their old clothing to Bordine if the museum wouldn’t accept them.

“I received so many gorgeous wedding dresses from women,” Bordine said. “I would interview them about their husbands, their wedding day, their honeymoon and such, and then tell those stories when the dresses were worn during the fashion shows, keeping the stories alive through the clothing.”

Bordine would create spreadsheets with the different outfits—down to the jewelry and accessories—so each model knew what they were wearing. Some items, like a lime green and fuchsia vinyl prom dress from the 1960s, were very popular and were always chosen first. “The models that had been in the show longest got first dibs on what they could wear,” Bordine says.

At one point, Bordine had over 600 pairs of shoes to make sure there was a pair that worked for both the dress and the model.

The Teacher

In the late nineties, Bordine began teaching a course at NMC called “Women’s Roles in Society Through Fashion.” She would start in the 1860s, showcasing how the clothing women wore was reflective of their roles in society. She brought in pieces to show the class and featured old movies and songs to accommodate her lectures.

“The class was a mixture of college students and senior citizens, many of whom would reminisce on a certain style of clothing from a past era,” Bordine says.

One of her favorite time periods: the 1920s, a pivotal year for womens’ fashion. When men went to war the decade before, women went to the factories and found that the long and cumbersome dresses they wore weren’t conducive to working. Corsets and petticoats were abandoned for shorter skirts and dresses that allowed more freedom of movement.

At this same time, Coco Chanel was becoming popular in Paris, and she favored a more athletic look. For the first time in centuries, women were showing their knees and ankles in public, and the shoes that they wore started to matter a lot more. Many of the fashion trends of the 1920s have shaped fashion today, Bordine says, which is part of the reason she loves that era so much.

Her perfect outfit from the twenties?

“It would definitely be a flapper dress—it would be a sleeveless kind of a sheath,” Bordine says. She opts for the classic dropped waist, rhinestone details, and a scarf edge on the hem. “The scarf edge, it’d be multiple layers of triangles going down. And when you danced or moved, they would flutter and furl and expose your knees.”

For accessories, she’d add a long beaded necklace and the so-called “headache” band—a headband worn across the forehead often decorated with feathers. Bordine laughs when sharing the background of the name: “It was the first time when women were drinking in public,” she says. “It got that nickname from flappers so often having hangover headaches."

A genuine flapper dress might be hard to come by, so Bordine focuses mainly on collecting everyday wear from previous decades.

“I love those the most, things that still have the grocery lists in the pockets, things that showed how life and women’s roles changed. I like seeing how their clothes were a reflection of what life was like back then,” Bordine says.

Bordine always keeps her eyes peeled for a great fashion find wherever she goes. She loves “the thrill of the hunt,” and doesn’t have any particular favorite locales to search for vintage items though she keeps a running list of local estate sales and secondhand shops to visit.

Rebuilding the Collection

Two years ago, nearly all of Bordine’s vintage clothing collection was destroyed in a garage fire—with an attic where she kept the bulk of her items—that devastated her and her husband. She has since received donations and connected with other vintage fashion collectors, but she deeply laments the loss of the collection and stories she spent so many years collecting.

One memory stands out from that time as particularly moving. “I was out in the yard, and I had my vintage clothing because it was in the very last section of the garage to burn,” Bordine says. “Things were so tightly packed on the racks, the left shoulder of everything burned off. But I had to prove to the insurance company that I own these, so I had them all laid out in the yard to dry and I was snapping pictures of each individual one…

“This car, this hot rod car from the ’70s, comes rumbling up to our house, and this kid stops, puts it in park, and gets out the driver’s side. And he’s got this Marlboro dangling out of his mouth, and when he comes around the other side, he grabs a bouquet of flowers and brings them to me. He says, ‘I got these flowers from my mom, and she told me that I should give them to somebody who needs them. And you just look like somebody who could use a bouquet of flowers.’”

Today, Bordine is working on rebuilding her collection piece by piece.

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