An Ex-Rock Band Member, a Costume Designer, and Their Vintage Store
The owners of The Getup Vintage do more for sustainability than your average second-hand store
—By Erin Evans
Lindsey Leyland received a call. While downsizing their great-aunt’s closet, a local family had discovered her prom dress, now decades old. They knew Leyland co-owned The Getup Vintage store, and they wondered if she wanted the dress.
Leyland was skeptical, but she went to the house anyway. What callers think are the gems of their vintage clothing collections are often not what Leyland wants. But snooping through the great-aunt’s closet, she discovered a treasure trove of vintage T-shirts. Leaving the prom dress, she asked for these.
Once rescued from a downsized closet, the clothing begins its journey to the racks in the purple and turquoise interior of The Getup. Leyland spot treats stains, soaks the garments in Retro Clean, washes them with detergent she makes herself, and lays them in the sun, which naturally lightens the fabric and kills bacteria.
Leyland checks “wear spots” — the waistline, armpits, neckline — and repairs broken seams and buttons. Each garment is tagged with a price, “era,” and, if available, a photo of it being worn by the original owner. It is measured, steamed, tagged, and finally joins the others of its decade on the rack.
The Getup stands out against a landscape of second-hand stores marketed as sustainable. Sustainability in fashion, an industry responsible for between eight and ten percent of world carbon emissions, 20% of industrial wastewater pollution, an annual estimated 92 million tons of textile waste, and an annual 500 thousand tons of microfibers released into oceans, has become an increasingly urgent concern. While buying used clothing avoids the pitfalls of buying new and deters consumers from supporting fast fashion, there remains a gap among second-hand stores regarding environmental accountability.
The Getup is an exception in terms of transparency and thoughtful sourcing, both of which many second-hand stores lack. The website describes Leyland and co-owner Kaylan Mitchell’s commitment to sustainability beyond merely being a second-hand store. Their website describes practices like the homemade soap and in person they happily disclose every step of their process, every happening at their warehouse, that would be a blurry, unbroachable topic for other stores. Leyland and Mitchell have nothing to hide, and, in fact, set a standard for vintage.
Roughly 70% of the prom dresses, T-shirts, and 60s leather jackets that end up in the store are sourced locally, the rest still coming from inside the country. In 17 years of business, Leyland said, she has learned “secrets” about where to find vintage clothes. Besides these long-term connections and the calls the store receives daily, they hold open buy days at the warehouse on Mondays.
Costume design to vintage: Leyland’s journey to The Getup
Leyland grew up in what she called a “very hippie household.” Sustainability, including homemade detergent, has been part of her lifestyle since she was a kid growing up in “nowhere, Pennsylvania.” Far from the closest mall, she started making her own clothing. This led to an interest and later career in theater costuming after she dropped out of college.
“That really sparked my love for the history of the garment,” said Leyland. She made 25 corsets for a production of Amadeus and became “obsessed” with how clothing had changed, how women dressed differently in the 1800s vs. the 1920s vs. the 70s. She took her sewing skills and began doing mending work for vintage stores.
Seventeen years ago, Leyland moved to Ann Arbor and discovered The Getup, then owned by Kelly McLeod. The store was new and housed in McLeod’s attic, above the current location. New to the city with no friends to see, Leyland spent as much time as she could in The Getup, the “one comfortable place” she knew. She made herself useful, volunteering to dress mannequins for free and hanging around until McLeod offered her a job.
“I worked for clothes,” said Leyland. “I didn’t really take home a paycheck; I took home so much clothing.” She was McLeod’s first employee.
Ten years later, after working on and off for McLeod and a stint running vintage stores in Chicago, Leyland returned to The Getup. McLeod was burnt out, she said, and had a new employee: Kaylan Mitchell.
Staying connected to music: Kaylan Mitchell’s journey to The Getup
Mitchell grew up playing in rock and roll bands in Troy, Michigan. As a “broke kid,” she turned to vintage and thrifting for new outfits to add to her stage persona. She skipped school to go to the Lost and Found thrift store. At the time, she could thrift 50s dresses for $7, she said.
“The band scene is hard,” said Mitchell. Her band, the Juliets, were talking to Capitol Records, near a deal that would get them touring under Katy Perry. When the deal fell through, the band “kind of imploded,” said Mitchell. She still loves the two albums she does have with the band.
Vintage remained a fixture in her life. She has seen how the worlds of music and fashion collide — vintage included — and feels a connection to the band scene that she left through the vintage clothing around her. After moving to Ann Arbor, she discovered The Getup on her “thrift route” through town. She felt drawn to the store from the beginning. There was something special about it, a need to “exist in this space.”
Every Tuesday, Mitchell brought a large popcorn from her job as a manager at the Michigan Theater to McLeod and searched through vintage dresses. When McLeod was hiring, Mitchell got the job.
Mitchell and Leyland met when Mitchell started coming into the store, but they didn’t become friends until Leyland was organizing The Getup’s fashion show, a partnership with SEE Eyewear involving models in vintage outfits and glasses. Leyland hired Mitchell to undress and redress models in seconds between walking the runway. As unusual of a job as it was, Mitchell and Leyland worked well together. They became friends and found out they lived four streets apart. When McLeod asked if they wanted to take over The Getup, both agreed it felt like a natural transition.
“[Leyland] sews; I do the books,” was Mitchell’s simplest way of describing how they run the store together. In the seven years since they took over, she claimed they have fought just once.
Selling stories
Leyland and Mitchell’s deepseated love of vintage clothing is at the heart of the store. They know they can’t rescue everything from relegation to the landfill, but they try to catch the most interesting pieces, the ones woven with the richest histories and made to last longer than the fast fashion made today.
The histories of each piece of clothing are a selling point, connecting customers to the clothing in a way impossible for new garments. When a visitor ducks behind the purple curtain of an orange and pink patterned dressing room and finds a piece that feels made for them, Leyland can bring out three more dresses from the same previous owner. The past and present wearers of the clothing connect in the store through their appreciation for style and the clothing that fits them both.
Leyland and Mitchell have rescued clothing that Mitchell wishes she had kept and that she couldn’t wait for someone to buy. Each piece is memorable. They once bought a monkey fur jacket from an estate sale, which felt like human hair and endlessly disturbed Mitchell from its place hanging on the wall. Six months later, a collector from New York took it. Much as she hated the jacket, she was glad the monkey was “honored again.”
Another time, The Getup housed a pair of shredded jean shorts with American flag patches that a woman had worn to Woodstock, complete with a picture of her wearing them at the festival.
Changing vintage as second-hand is changing
Finding decades-old vintage pieces in thrift stores is possible, but they are more and more overrun by flimsy, badly made fast fashion pieces, making thrift stores themselves less sustainable. Fashion cycles are becoming shorter. Clothing that is only five or ten years old is now being sold at some vintage stores, regardless of the fact that clothing from the early 2000s onward is generally more cheaply made or not made to last. When well-made, vintage clothing does make its way into thrift stores, it is unlikely to be cared for properly.
Even among vintage stores, quality control is an issue. The careful cleaning and repairing of every item that comes to The Getup cannot be taken for granted. Leyland described how before clothing manufacturers outsourced labor to underpaid workers overseas, clothing was made with the care that is now rarely found except in couture garments. She pointed to a rack of coats, many with silk linings, specialty covered buttons, and hand stitching on the insides. That standard of clothing has fallen in the past two decades.
Besides the smaller steps Leyland and Mitchell take to ensure sustainability in their store like using paper bags and only doing full laundry loads, they were some of the first people to partake in DTE’s green energy program, making their business and their homes entirely solar powered.
The usual connotations of clothing as new and replaceable, and the pressure to over-consume it, are left on the sidewalk outside the store. Leyland describes The Getup as a “no pressure zone.” She does not want anyone to buy something unless they love it. If they later decide they don’t love a piece, she encourages them to sell it back to her, keeping anything from being thrown away.
Not just the clothing in the store is vintage: Everything is used. When the Urban Outfitters on State Street closed, Leyland waited watchfully for them to throw away their mannequins so she could swoop in and take them for The Getup. She retrieved other mannequins from American Apparel when they closed. The jewelry case at the front of the store was from another vintage store. None of the decorations have been bought new either. Leyland found a poster of a person with blue hair and the word “peace” at an estate sale. It now hangs on the wall above a shelf of mugs and candles. Another poster she and Mitchell found in a Detroit warehouse behind half a car.
Located on State Street, the store gets a variety of customers. Some, Leyland said, don’t know what vintage clothing is. Others are adept vintage shoppers. Mitchell has noticed a shift overall toward caring about sustainability. She hears younger people especially discussing the benefits of buying second-hand while trying things on in the dressing rooms.
In the midst of an industry that favors continuously cheaper, lower-quality clothing, overproduction, and exploitative labor practices, Leyland and Mitchell are running a different type of store. One that values clothing in a way less and less common, one that values openness and changes the rhetoric around consumption, encouraging customers to only buy something they feel connected to. Leyland and Mitchell know they cannot solve the problems with the clothing industry on their own, but they are taking steps beyond what second-hand stores often do. They can’t save all of the clothes, but they can save the best ones and give them the care they deserve.
Said Mitchell, they hand pick every piece of clothing “because it’s stylish, because it’s relevant, because it’s of good quality.”
She and Leyland take the clothing that has already lived since before the days of fast fashion and care for it so, as Leyland said, “it lasts another 40 years for you.”
Feature photo of Kaylan Mitchell and Lindsey Leyland outside The Getup; photo credit, Kaylan Mitchell and Lindsey Leyland