Adelaide fashion boutique Irving Baby! is set to close its current York Street premises this November after 23 years of bringing vintage style and locally designed pieces to the city.
Run by sisters Briar Petersen and Trenna Oelsnik since 1992 when the pair opened their first store in Renaissance Centre off Rundle Mall, the venture has shuffled around the Adelaide CBD with locations in Pultney Street, Hindley Street, Gawler Place and Twin Street, before the hotel development that prompted the closure of the Jade Monkey saw them uproot for a final time to their current location on York Street (tucked behind The Austral).
Along with keeping South Australian fashion buffs well-attired the shop has helped provide vintage duds for musicians like Karen O, Sia, The Dandy Warhols, Tim Rogers and Alice Cooper as well as productions like Australian Idol, McLeod’s Daughters and Red Dog.
As Oelsnik explains, a variety of factors informed the decision to wind up the shop as it currently exists. “I guess one of the biggest challenges was moving out of Twin Street when they built the IBIS Hotel there. We’d been there for about 15 years,” she says “It was a bit of a challenge to find an affordable space in a reasonable location, but we were quite happy to find this space – we love a bit of sunshine.”
York Street, Irving Baby!’s home since 2012
After many good years however, changes in shopping habits and the ongoing challenges of keeping up to date have prompted the pair to take a well-earned rest. “We changed our business a lot, going back to purely vintage,” she says. “With online shopping things we used to do with new stock, we found it harder to compete selling new things because businesses would now have their own online stores. So we made the decision to go back to vintage, all one-off pieces that you’re better off trying on and seeing in the flesh.
“We’ve very much into the bricks and mortar thing. We don’t mind online but it’s not really our natural world,” she says.
“I think these days there’s been a big shift towards ‘experience’ as being one of the big things people want – they have less time so can’t spend an hour in a shop on their own. People like to go to an event like a market, it’s social you have a lot of different things on offer in one place,” she explains. “We’ve done a few that have been fantastic like That Dapper Market and Gilles Street Market,” she says.
While Irving Baby! in its current form has run its course, the pair aren’t ruling out new projects down the track, once they’ve caught their breath that is. “At the moment we’re just thinking about having a bit of a break,” she laughs. “We might do something again, we still absolutely love vintage so I wouldn’t be surprised if we do something, but what that might be we don’t know.”
“We have seen many changes in Adelaide over the years and I feel blessed to have met so many wonderful people in the store and to have been able to collaborate with a range of local ‘creatives’ over the past 23 years,” Oelsnik says.
The pair will wind up the current York Street site with an “Everything Must Go” sale from October 1 to celebrate over two decades of fashion.
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What
Irving Baby!
Where
35 York Street, Adelaide
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