Fair Game

Emily Current and Meritt Elliott head to Texas’s Round Top Antiques Fair in search of design inspiration. Spoiler alert: They don’t go home empty-handed.

- Lauren Smith Ford

In early October, while the fashion world transplanted itself to the runways of Paris, Emily Current and Meritt Elliott, the celebrity stylists–turned–designers, found themselves in Round Top, a speck of a town in the Texas Hill Country, for the triannual Round Top Antiques Fair—a Texas institution since 1968. Three times a year, the one-stoplight community—situated between Austin and Houston, and with a population of less than 100—transforms itself into a whirling dervish of fashion and design inspiration. It’s in this itty-bitty piece of rural Texas that 200,000 shoppers and 6,000 antiques dealers hawking everything from vintage Stetsons to high-end European antiques convene on a jam-packed 20-mile stretch of barns and tent-filled cow pastures. Originally a place for in-the-know antiquers, Round Top (which recently added a third show to its calendar due to popular demand) has become a more mainstream destination over the last decade as buyers from Anthropologie and Restoration Hardware started making the journey for inspiration and store-display propping.