What really goes on behind the scenes? Industry experts share their knowledge

William Banks-Blaney is the man behind WilliamVintage, a brand specialising in haute couture and high-end vintage. He is currently running a four-week  William Vintage pop-up on the second floor at  Selfridges, selling early work by Lanvin, Dior and Balenciaga. 

How did you get into vintage?
I had always loved vintage clothing and I travelled a lot in my previous job as an interior designer and when I was travelling I would often see something that caught my eye so I might be trying to find rugs in Turkey and find a fantastic kilim coat for a client. And, after a few years, I thought, well I am going to try this. 

Where do you find your vintage?
I go around the world for them. So it’s Milton Keynes to Missouri, New York to York. I travel around the globe to hunt down the pieces that I think are fantastic.  Not every piece of vintage clothing has an amazing back story. We buy from private families, we buy from little dealers that might be located in the middle of Missouri. You never know where you’re going to find a great piece. Some have lovely romantic stories, but not all of them.

Do you ever rent vintage gowns?
We don’t ever rent clothes. We lend clothes to celebrities in the same way Gucci or Burberry would do. It’s in my nature to want to dress the world. There isn’t a woman I wouldn’t want to dress. We worked with Rachel Zoe when she wore a 1960s Pierre Cardin dress to a Dior show in Paris, which just looked really beautiful, sharp and fantastic. There is nothing about clothes that Rachel doesn’t know so I loved working with her. Gillian Anderson wore a 1956 Sybil Connolly we loaned her at the 2012 Baftas. That was one of my favourite red carpet moments of all time.  

How do you choose your pieces?
It’s really buying what I like. So obviously we’re fairly high-end and we have a particular focus on vintage haute couture but it’s across the board. We start from £200, I’m not a label snob, I’ll buy something that I like, it doesn’t need to be ridiculously expensive or a museum-quality piece. 

What are your tips for buying vintage?
The first thing is don’t be a label snob. That’s really important because a lot of these dresses are more than 50 years old and labels can fall off a dress. Secondly, across the board for vintage, the quality is higher because the quality of production was higher. A fairly standard piece from the 1950s or 1960s is usually really beautifully made or constructed. Thirdly, forget about hanger appeal – hanger appeal is a relatively new phenomenon for retail; you’ll often find a dress that looks fantastic on the hanger on the high street but when you put it on it can be quite disappointing. Vintage is generally the reverse of that. Vintage clothes are designed to look fantastic on the body, not on the hanger on the rail. So if you see something and you love the colour or the texture or it has something about it, just try it on. They might look lumpy on the hanger, particularly the 1950s dresses, but they’ll look wonderful on you.
 
What are your tips for removing stains from vintage clothing, or repairing pieces?
You have to be very careful about this. If you see a sequinned or beaded dress and some of the sequins are missing then you have to be very careful about buying it.  It’s very easy to think, ‘Oh it’s only got one area of beading missing’; it’s really difficult to find beading that actually works. You can set yourself up for an impossible task and it can cost a great deal of money. You can lift a huge amount of stains out though – the key is a really good dry cleaner. We work with Upstage Theatrical Dry Cleaners; they cleaned the Givenchy collection from the Audrey Hepburn estate.