Paper Dress Vintage

If you walk along Mare Street in Hackney on a Saturday night, you are greeted by the odd sight of a queue snaking out of a vintage clothing store.

- CLAUDIA COCKERELL

Multi-coloured lights and music burst from the upstairs window, while a crowd of young artistic types trickles through the door. By day, Paper Dress Vintage could be any retro clothing shop. Mannequins wearing 1950s dresses and 1970s silk shirts stand in the window, while inside there are rail upon rail of clothes and knick-knacks dating back to the 1920s. When night falls, it transforms into a bar, live music venue and club.

“The shopfront helps to naturally filter the crowd — we attract creative, fun and open-minded people,” says owner Hannah Turner Voakes. The day-to-night transformation is a slick operation: after closing time, clothes are whipped behind curtains and into storage, the bar staff set up and whichever bands or musicians are playing that night do a sound check. By 8.30pm everything is in full swing.

Turner Voakes opened Paper Dress Vintage when she was an art student. “I was working at Liberty’s department store, living in a pub and buying vintage up north and selling at fairs down south, when I got the opportunity to meet an investor, Dragons’ Den style, to open the shop,” she says. It launched in 2007, and started life as a traditional vintage clothing store on Curtain Road in Shoreditch.

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