Costume Party Closing Vintage And Costume Store After 30 Years

A fixture on the vintage clothing and costume shop scene, Costume Party is closing today after nearly 30 years in the business. We caught up with the owner, Spig, who tells us “the party’s over” after five years on Haight Street, 15 years on Fillmore Street, and finally, 11 years in Nob Hill. The window shop shows a story of paperwork with the building owner leading to the store’s eviction.

Hoodline: How did you find yourself at a vintage store on Haight Street?

Spig: I was unemployed, found a little vintage store on Haight Street, talked the guy into letting me have a job, and I helped him build Held Over, where I was the first store manager and worked there for two and a half years.”

HL: What your store’s trajectory after that?

Spig: My [Held Over] ex-boss had a partner and the partner didn’t really like me. This was when AIDS came, in ‘84, and he had AIDS. And he decided to get out of San Francisco, bought property in Davis, California, and made a store up there. But in the meantime, he’d bought a building on Haight Street, and said, “well, the deal is I can’t own and operate a store on Haight Street because of my deal with my partner, but you could, and I’ll be your partner, and I’ll supply you.” So, I became the proxy. It was where the soccer store is now [Elite Sports].

HL: What was it like to own a shop on Haight then?

Spig: There was a community being built. Not like how it is now—it’s so fragmented there. Then it was—another store came, they were welcome, another store came, found its niche. The I-Beam was the best club in town. As I like to say—the Haight wasn’t happening, the Haight was it.

Only half of the store fronts were open in ’79, and half of those were owned by gay men, and they said, “we’re not going to let this become a gay ghetto. We don’t want to make this the next gay street.” So they didn’t.

HL: Why did you move on from the Haight?

Spig: My partner sold the building and I had to leave. So I found a nice, big building in the Fillmore. That’s where rock stars came in, movie stars came in.

HL: Like who?

Spig: Catherine Deneuve. I met Graham Nash, who’s the greatest guy. I met Tom Petty in the store, and that’s when I realized rock stars shouldn’t be seen in the daytime. Bill Graham put everybody up at the Miyako Hotel, so all those guys stayed there and wandered in. Missy Elliot came in, Beck came in and bought stuff for a video he made in San Francisco. Daryl Hannah came in, and that was interesting—she bought a swimsuit. Nothing like Daryl Hannah popping out of your dressing room! And I guess Kate Moss bought a swimsuit from me too, but I wasn’t there that day.

HL: How did your business change or improve after you moved to Fillmore?

Spig: Finally the nouveau swing movement began, and by the late 80s, it had really become a movement. Those of us who’d been wearing vintage clothes had just been wearing vintage clothes, but all of a sudden, people got interested in the music, so people wanted to wear the clothes.

That’s why people could make it on Haight Street, because it was sort of a new movement. It was the thing that I called ‘all dressed up and somewhere to go’, because you had a club you could go to, you had somewhere to buy the clothes, and bands you could see and do the dances to. Club Deluxe started on Haight Street—that helped.

HL: How did that change the vintage shopping business?

Spig: It became the norm. You could get on a Muni bus and see somebody in vintage clothes—you weren’t just the weird guy with your grandfather’s hat on. This was a good thing for San Francisco—dressing up was okay. That’s why a lot of stores in the Haight could get in on it, and we really built it up.

HL: How has the Haight changed?

Spig: You could move to the neighborhood in those days. It was a community. We had the best club, the best bar—Night Break—we had a bowling alley, and a movie theatre, couple places you could buy drugs, and everybody was happy in the Haight. And right when I was moving, around ’89, a lot of people were saying “you’re lucky you’re getting out now.” Why? I said. Crack, they said.

HL: How was your business on Fillmore different?

Spig: Well people found me, and I had a reputation. Bit by bit, costumey stuff crept in. Sunglasses, masks, boas, petticoats. So what made me different from other stores? I had a good eye and I applied a costume eye to it. I wasn’t just the vintage store where you could buy a ’50s dress, but also you could say, “oh, I need some fishnets, I’ll get some fishnets, too”. So I became the “wacky Woolworth’s”. I was able to appeal to a lot of different kinds of people.

HL: So more costumes led to… Costume Party?

Spig: The year I moved to Nob Hill in 2004 was when I decided to change my name to Costume Party. About that year is when the costume and lingerie industry melded, and they begat sexy costumes. The corset companies started going, “if we change this corset it’s a pirate costume”, and the costume companies went, “yeah, we’ll make a sexy nurse, why not.” Then a whole business of petticoat makers sprang up. Around then, 2007-2009, business was really good.

HL: What do you think the future brings?

The days of individualism and trying to be different are falling away. Everybody’s just trying to be like everybody else again. There’s nowhere to get a lease—not in a reasonable place for the public to go shopping. All it takes in San Francisco now is one small-minded building owner who takes your fun away.

HL: So what are you going to do?

Spig: So what am I going to do? It’s more about what I’m not going to get to do. I’m not going to get to help clothe every kind of person in San Francisco. I don’t know how to answer that. I hope to still live in the Bay Area.

End Of An Era

During our interview with Spig at the store, we heard three different customers express their sorrow over the closing. One of them said: “I’ve been lamenting the loss of your shop. Four days, right?” before promising to come back before the last day. 

And, as a customer said on Costume Party’s Facebook page: “San Francisco is losing another icon. Sorry to see another eccentric shop owner squeezed out.”

We are, too. Costume Party’s last day is today.

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Is it time for stocks without brokers?

The word is disintermediation. With the proliferation of lavishly funded e-commerce enterprises, this is happening in every sphere of activity. The grocer, the mobile store guy, the taxi company, the banker, the real estate broker and the mutual fund distributor are some of the people who were earlier indispensable to our lives and are now going out of business. Technology-driven platforms and applications (‘apps’) are replacing these intermediaries, creating a win-win proposition for both manufacturers and consumers.

Yet, in one area which took to technology earlier than others, nobody talks of direct access to consumers. People in the big cities have learnt to buy books, mobiles, shoes and even something as personal as lingerie online. Why do they need a broker to buy stocks which were dematerialised long ago and can be delivered directly into your account?

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) implemented direct plans for mutual funds since January 1, 2013. By June that year, these plans came to account for nearly a quarter of the sector’s assets under management. While the initial push came from debt funds, recent reports suggest around half of the fresh inflows from retail investors in equity funds are through direct plans. This shows that investors, even smaller ones, are gaining confidence about choosing and making their investments online.

Even the insurance sector, with a more powerful intermediaries lobby, has seen the advent of online products that allow you to buy insurance and unit-linked investment plans directly.

Now, for someone, who can understand an insurance policy with its numerous terms and conditions and buy it online, buying a stock without the help of a broker should not be a difficult proposition. Why are Sebi or the exchanges not even thinking aloud about it?

After all, what great help is a broker to a small investor? Common sense demands that the broker deploys his best resources to some of the larger clients. So, you are going to get some a fresh-from-college relationship manager who might only be parroting what he heard on TV this morning to push the stock his boss wanted him to.

In addition, you are showing your cards to a potential competitor in the market. Most broking firms have a proprietary book where it uses its own money to buy and sell stocks. Nothing stops your broker from playing against you, despite the obvious conflict of interest. What is worse is you are paying him to fleece you.

This column would not be enough if one begins quoting anecdotes of retirees and widows falling prey to wrong broking advice and seeing their life’s savings vanish in thin air to margin calls. Brokers often use the client agreements to absolve themselves of any responsibility in such cases. As in the recent scams, after playing along, they don’t think twice about being turncoat and play the victim.

No wonder big successful investors on the Street like Rakesh Jhunjhunwala have their own broker licence. Large corporate treasuries also often execute through their own broking firms. Beside the considerable savings on transaction costs, these big guys are also able to play their cards close to their chests, an underplayed but critical factor to investment success.

Online trading has been available in the market for years. But, there is still a broker who sits in between, providing the platform and charging a fee. It is not the objective of this piece to advocate the end of stock broking but, if an investor wants to do without it, he should have an opportunity and an avenue to do so.

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