Vintage dress shopping in Edinburgh

After my little foray into Op shops in Edinburgh, I still had some energy left for a little trip around the city’s vintage stores(whilst waiting for the volcanic ash to settle in the street outside!). I did my research before leaving Australia and found only six stores (which makes sense given Edinburgh’s population is only around five hundred thousand). I managed to vist four of the stores: Armstrong Vintage (two of their stores), Barnados Vintage and Emily’s Vintage. Armstrong Vintage is the largest of the vintage sellers in Edinburgh, with three large stores full to the brim with vintage of all kinds and eras, including vintage militaria and vintage Scottish costumes.

The main store in ‘Grassmarket’ (a street off High Street) is their biggest store and is absolutely crammed full of vintage. It also stocks wacky costumes. It is very colourful and decorated zanily, but I am not sure how much ‘quality’ vintage was there. There was a lot of 1960’s and 1970’s, but only a handful of 50’s dresses.

                                 One of the shop windows in Armstrong Vintage - I love the sign!

This mannequin hanging in the centre of the shop is also great.

Despite the fact that it is no Circa Vintage (not many places are), it is always fun to browse in shops like these. Not the least because of some of the interesting ways the mannequins are dressed. Notice the ‘necklace’ of gloves in the middle mannequin below? Cute!

This is an example of one of the nicer things I found in the shop - what looks like an early 1960's coat (? please correct me if I am mistaken!). From memory, it was around 70 pounds (about $110)

Below is a photo of the men's section, which as you can see, was full of militaria.

The other two vintage stores, Emily's Vintage and Barnados were fairly standard 'cheaper' vintage stores (sort of Lost and Found standard, but very small) - so nothing too exciting to report there.

So all in all, I would not exactly rush to buy vintage in Edinburgh, but its good fun to browse. Goodbye from Edinburgh!

PS apologies if this post is not formatted all that well, I am doing this in a Wifi hotspot in an Edinburgh hostel surrounded by around 50 very loud French students (poor things have obviously been waiting here all day for the airport to open again so I didn't want to ask them to pipe it down!)

A statue outside Edinburgh Castle - beautiful