Step into a Dream at Seven Wonders Collective

October 16, 2023

Seven Wonders Collective is more than just a vintage collective — upon my first time walking into the playful space in Williamsburg, I felt like I had really struck vintage gold. The dream-like space is the closet of every collector’s fantasies, with carefully curated hangers displaying one-of-a-kind treasures that I couldn’t even dream up.

Though the garments and accessories stored in SWC’s three locations are magical enough on their own, what is most alluring about the shop is the colorful community that it conjures. Founder Melissa Blumberg opens her space up to vendors who really enliven the space, bringing their unique pieces and perspectives together to create a menagerie of experiences, tastes, and must-have pre-loved finds.

Interview by Kayla Curtis-Evans
Photos by Noel Austin

office caught up with Blumberg after she decided to bring the magic to a new neighborhood by opening a brand new storefront in NYC’s Lower East Side, below.

When did you begin to take up an interest in vintage or secondhand clothing and what spurred it?

I started thrifting early in high school, or maybe middle school. I had a learning difference so I had to move from public to private school and that school had a uniform — khaki pants and polo shirts. I’ve only recently recovered. It’s taken me many, many years but I am finally able to wear tan pants. I always felt like an outsider at that school; getting home and changing out of my uniform was a big part of my day. I was obsessed with the movie Dazed and Confused and I started going to the thrift stores to try and find clothes from the 70s.

How would you describe your own personal style?

When I’m sourcing, I ask myself if it is unique, sexy, or stand-by. I have a kid now, so I do tend to wear more outfits on repeat than ever before. I need those go-to, basic, stand-by pieces that I can wear over and over. I usually change it up with my outerwear. I am very drawn to old, delicate things that clearly consumed a lot of someone’s time to create. Patchwork and embroidery — I am a sucker for you.

Your third location is now in Manhattan, while the others take up post in Brooklyn. Why did you decide to bring SWC to the Lower East Side? Does this neighborhood reflect your own personal style in any way?

Ever since I first visited Manhattan as a child walking around the LES, the style has always been inspiring. When I first moved to NYC in the late '00s, going out meant going to the LES. Shows at Pianos or drinks at Motorcity and shopping at this vintage shop on Delancey called Marmalade was what we did back then. I have always had the idea that having an establishment in Manhattan is big time, and I guess this year I was feeling big time! And if I was going to go for a space in Manhattan, to me, there was really no other neighborhood I was interested in.

Seven Wonders Collective is really a community. How do you choose the vendors to work with and sell in the shop and what does this community mean to you?

SWC is the most amazing community! I feel insanely blessed to work with all of the hard-working, vintage-obsessed vendors that have come to call these shops home. Everyone involved in the shop works together to make the stores the magical, treasure-filled, dreamlands that they are. Now that there are so many people asking to sell in the shop, I try and choose vendors who have the highest quality items and also have their own perspectives. The main reason I started a collective rather than another vintage store on my own is because I wanted the store to speak to as many people who walk in as possible. From doing the solo store thing, I learned that not everybody wants to wear the prints and funky '70s sets that I’m drawn to when I source. Having the collective, I can still buy the kinds of clothes I like for my rack and also have the more minimalist and maximalist bases covered on other vendors' racks. It’s also really much more fun to visit — even for me — because there is literally something, often it’s more like 20 new things, coming in every single day at each location.

What is your favorite vintage garment you have ever discovered?

I think I have two! My favorite garment I ever discovered and regret selling was a lavender crushed velvet Todd Oldham dress with insane beaded flowers all over the bust. My favorite garment I ever discovered and kept is this just perfect 1940s black corduroy jumpsuit with white contrast stitching. I would wear it out and the seam on the shoulder would rip at some point in my night and I would go home and sew it up. The next time I'd wear it out, the seam on my waist would rip, and then the next time the seam on the butt ripped. I kept ‘Frankensteining’ it back together for years and years. I'm almost back to my pre-pregnancy self and am excited to bring it back. It is very quiet but undeniably special.

What is your favorite part of owning a vintage retailer?

Seeing all of the amazing treasures our vendors find and then watching them find new homes and lives with our customers. Our customers are so cool! It’s amazing to see how they style everything after they bring it home.

If you were a vintage garment, which would you be and why? Would you be sparkly? What color would you be?

I think I would like to be a blouse some dreamy teenage girl made and embroidered with flowers in the early 1900s that was then hidden in the back of their closet for years and years until a great-great-grandchild found it and put it on. I would really want to embody the spirit that was built into the shirt. I think that’s what I’m always looking for when I go sourcing — the treasure someone couldn’t discard. I know I could choose to wear some fancy and beautiful designer dress, but the whole reason I got into this business was to discover lost and forgotten treasure and that’s really why I’m still here.

A lot of people don’t approach vintage shopping because they aren’t sure where to start. What is your best advice for beginners? How do you put together the ideal vintage look for you?

I think that beginners should start small. Follow their instincts. What about vintage is calling to them? I like vintage because you can find unique pieces. I know others are in it to find designer staples that they can wear for many years to come. For me, I try to stick with one attention-grabbing item and keep the rest simple. Fun cowboy boots or a bright Coogi sweater, but never the two together!

Fashion

Happy 424 Day!

Simon Rasmussen — What's going on?

Guillermo Andrade — Right now we're just setting everything up.

So, what are you doing, is it a party?

Well, I kind of felt universally forced, right? Because 4/24/24, I was just like, I don’t really have a choice here. The stars also just kind of aligned, so to be honest, I got this settlement that came with a bunch of clothes so I had this idea to give back to the kids who fuck with us by allowing them to buy our shit first. Not handing stuff out for free, but to do it in a way where we could skip the middleman of the industry, so to speak, and not allow clothes to disappear into the abyss of Farfetch or whatever else. So what we’re going to do is a sort of warehouse sale, which we’ve never done before so that was really exciting for me. I didn’t want to do just another warehouse sale, so it’s like a sample sale turns rager. We teamed up with Adidas and a couple of other sponsors, then drinks, DJs, and a performance.

Sick, I love it.

Yeah. My dream sample sale. Also, it’s not just hoodies and t-shirts here in there, it’s proper collections from the past three seasons. I’m also not picking and choosing, trying to make it accessible, like this was the only way I could afford to buy shit when I was a kid, bro. Sample sales were the thing I looked forward to the most.

I feel you. In New York, there's the annual CDG sale, which is when I used to cop all my CDG.

The only time I could afford Rick. I flew to New York once for a Rick sample sale and I was like, Wow, I can't believe I got invited. And it was mental. I still have those pieces. I will never sell them. Not even because I got 'em cheap. It was also just really fun. Even on the flight to New York, I was like, I can't believe I'm going to New York for a sample sale, what a fucking loser I am. But it was like the adult version of when I was a kid and I was like, Wow, I can't believe I'm 20-something and I'm still doing the thing I was doing in high school. So I hope we can create moments like that for kids here in LA.

Yeah. I love that. It’s important to connect with them; they’re essentially creating the brand. If you don't have them, good luck.

I mean, yeah. Fuck, bro. It's cool that we've been around for this long. I mean, it got a little rocky there for a second I think, for all of us. So coming out of it, tomorrow is a celebration. And it’s like an odd day of the week. It's a Wednesday, super random. And now that we've set it up, the homies are all like, Yo, I'm coming. I'm coming. Let me jump on stage, let me do this, and that's really what it's always been about. It's not some other strategy to get likes on the internet.

That’s how the best things happen, you just couldn’t help yourself. It was intuitive.

Yeah, it all came together in a really nice way.

Would you say that’s how 424 started as well? I remember we met in like 2010 on Fairfax and I was visiting with Rasmus…

Oh bro, it’s probably the time when I started the branch… do you remember Cecilia from Black Dakini? She’s the one that introduced me to CIFF and honestly, I didn’t even care what she was doing, I was just like, I’m coming, I’ll go with you. She said she’d give me half of her booth and I said, Awesome count me in. At the time, I had just gotten my green card and I wasn't allowed to ever leave America, so Copenhagen was one of the first cities I went to when I could finally travel. I mean, you see what we did at CIFF bro? It became our fucking hub for half a decade.

That was a moment for sure.

I remember the first account I got was Antonioli, and he came super gangster, being like, You're going to sell me these clothes. And I was like, bro, I didn't come to sell clothes. I'm just kind of catching a vibe with my homie and I made these things. And he's like, No, you're going to sell it to me. And then I was like, Oh my god that’s Claudio Antonioli. So then I went home, I googled wholesale, and figured that shit out. [laughs]

[Laughs]

Like you said, I couldn't help myself, but I didn't just make t-shirts and hoodies either. I was really on my Rick wave, so I made my version of the Rick things. It was that meets like The Boondock Saints, because I'm still a little bit of a Cali bro, sort of rock kid, but not really. I like hip-hop, but I like the way the rock stars look. I like the contrast. I thought it was cool. After that, I just never stopped.

It was clear to me when I first met you that you were onto your own thing in LA. It made a lot of sense, and it was so cool. It was before 424 was its own brand; you just had the store and this really cool curation.

It was all my shit, bro. I was very, very invested in sharing all of these things that I was finding from all over the world, like Astrid Anderson. She was one of those designers at the time, so important to 424. The connection to Copenhagen specifically for me was huge. I had a big fan base there. It was incredible. And then here in LA, we were sharing the things that we were a part of and finding; it was still the early days of Fear of God, Rhude, Martine Rose. A lot of these brands, we were the first store to ever sell it — we were selling Hood By Air on the West Coast.

You had Rick as well, I remember.

Oh yeah. It took me a long time. But I got Rick, bro. By the time I had to close the store on Fairfax, I already had a Raf Simons account. I had reached my ultimate dream. It was really all the stuff I wanted to wear at the time. It was dope. The best of the best.

We had an office magazine newsstand in there as well.

Oh yeah, we did! I came to visit the one you had, and I was like, Yo, I got to bring this whole fucking thing over here. But yeah, in LA, after two days people forget you exist, but everyone’s been super supportive. We’re all 10 years older now. We've been around forever at this point.

It can be dangerous to take those breaks when you’re figuring shit out, but there’s something very genuine to this comeback you’re having.

Thank you, thank you. We’ve been in and out of those fucking showrooms in Paris for long enough. I've been in and out of these factories for the past 10 years of my life. We had to figure something out. And I think now really diving in, being in Italy full time and being there to develop these products over time, I think that the whole thing just really shows the suppliers respect you more. The people who are making your goods understand why you're making them. And I think now I finally got to the place where I'm not making Italian things, I’m making my clothes, I'm making Cali-centric shit, but with that European technicality and execution. With this Fall / Winter collection, it clicked.

So what’s the vision for the next year? What are you manifesting?

I'm just fucking relentless, bro. This is the way I want to live my life. Now that we are more aligned, more prepared, and have more experience, moving forward it is just more of becoming a fully functioning company that can provide and create opportunities for all of the people around me. We’ve been operating just on instinct for a long time.

Sustaining a business is scary, trust me I know.

Scary as fuck, dog. I just opened a store next to Bottega, bro, and it’s like what am I even doing? You have to just believe in the thing you're doing more than anybody else.

100%, and it seems like that’s what you’re doing.

And fashion’s kind of a competitive sport, as much as people don’t think it is. We can reach a certain level without losing ourselves. My biggest ambition at the moment is to create something that, when you leave one of our neighbors you come into our place you don’t feel that the level has been sacrificed at all. And it’s not easy.

Definitely. I wish I could be there tomorrow.

Thank you, bro. 10 years now. You’ve always shown me so much love. We have to do a booth or have the office part of the next 424 day. Shit let’s do a 424 day in New York.

That would be sick. Let's do it. I'm here. Let’s catch up soon.

Next season’s right around the corner so I’ll see you in Paris.

Yes, see you in Paris and Happy 424 day!

Fashion

Luis De Javier's Puta Takeover

April 25, 2024

Last night with Luis De Javier, guests were overheard confirming this generation's most vital conundrum: “If I’m cunt, I can still be pussy.” “And if you’re pussy, you can still be cunt.” This sentiment echoed throughout the night as we celebrated De Javier’s first-ever streetwear collection, "Puta". We spent seven hours at Ella Funt at a dinner turned party that only he could’ve thrown (co-hosted by emcee). It was too dark for even the most aspiring-to-look-mysterious of us to wear sunglasses inside. Under the semi-oppressive flash of party photographers, we danced as much as the space would allow, drank tequila out of teacups and kissed each other on the cheeks with a vaguely European intimacy. “I’m doing streetwear!” De Javier could be heard exclaiming — whether it be in disbelief or excitement, we couldn’t tell you.

Words and photos by Izzy Capulong

The Spanish-born London-based designer has been well-loved for his genderless tailoring, latex mastery, and overall message of empowerment. Dressing everyone from ravers to A-listers, De Javier’s latest drop pushes his design repertoire to a new level. “While designing for my celebrity clientele and showcasing my creations on the runway has always been my dream,” he notes, “It’s equally important to me that my brand resonates with a wider, more diverse audience.” While this collection’s medium has shifted from corsets to sweatshirts, the classic LDJ avant-garde sensibilities remain. Bikinis and booty shorts are shamelessly emblazoned with “PUTA,” blazers are constructed with ample shoulder padding, and I had my eye on the cheekily-named “Faguette Bag.”

The Puta collection will be available exclusively on emcee.

Fashion

Nadia Lee Cohen Celebrates Paris Texas Launch at the Chateau

To celebrate the launch, Cohen and founder and creative director of Paris Texas, Annamaria Brivio hosted an intimate dinner at the Chateau Marmont pictured below. Arman Naféei entertained guests throughout the evening with a special playlist he curated for the occasion.