About
caitiedid is a small vintage archive, run quietly out of Melbourne, a project of artist Caitlin Aloisio Shearer.
Caitlin looks for clothing with some life still in it. Mostly older pieces, mostly natural fibres, things that have softened into themselves. She cleans them, mends what needs mending, and spends a while getting to know a piece before it's listed. She tries not to over-restore. A visible repair is usually more honest than a hidden one, and a little wear tends to add something rather than take it away. The point, mostly, is that they keep going, finding the next person and the one after that. Their life shouldn't stop here.
The door is half open.
A dress rests where the light can find it, waiting to be needed.
A sleeve shifts in the moving air.
She doesn't still it.
She works as she speaks, palms flattening fabric, fingers tracing seams.
•
Where does the name come from?
Three things at once. A katydid, the green singing insect that sings in the dark. It's also the plainest possible sentence: Caitie did. Subject, verb. 'I did this.' Because I did... I found and washed and stitched and photographed the thing. & It was my name before it was the shop's name, so really the shop borrowed it from me, which feels like the correct direction for borrowing to go.
How did you begin?
Before there was a shop there was a painter, a textile designer and a seamstress, and all three of those were really just one person trying to get close to cloth from every possible angle. I painted it, I designed it, I sewed it, and the whole time I was collecting it, hoarding it, learning it with my hands. caitiedid is the culmination of all of that. Many years of obsessing, finally given somewhere to live. The name was just me finally admitting what the obsession had quietly become.
How do you choose?
With my hands, mostly. You can see a thing from across a room but you don't know it until you hold it. There's a moment where it either settles in the hand or it doesn't. The weight matters, not heaviness, but how it falls. The hand tends to know before the mind does, and I've stopped arguing with it.
What are you drawn to?
Things that resist being perfect. A perfect garment is a closed door, there's nothing for me to do with it, nowhere to put my hands. I want the one with the strange collar, the colour that has no name, the cut that's a little too much. Natural fibres almost always, because they age like a face and not like a photograph. The era is the least interesting fact about a piece. I'll take 1910 or 1994, the eye doesn't keep a calendar.
What happens once you bring something home?
It gets bathed. I mean that, carefully, like a small ceremony, because most of what arrives has decades of somebody else's life in it. Then I sit with it and find where it's strained and where it's been held and how it was worn, which is the closest you ever get to a garment's previous life. I repair what I can without changing its character. I'm a seamstress before I'm a seller, so the mending isn't a step, it's the part I love most.
What is your relationship to imperfection?
Fading is just a garment telling you it's been lived in, and I find that moving. I look for balance, evidence of a life without loss of function. A small mark I can accept if it doesn't interrupt the whole. When damage overtakes a piece it loses its clarity, and that's the moment I put it down, gently, like ending a conversation that's run its course.
What do people come to you for?
Half the people who find me aren't really shopping. They're looking for evidence that the strange specific person they suspect they are is allowed to exist and get dressed in the morning. I have the cloth for that person. I've been collecting it for them for years without knowing their names.
Do you trust the measurements?
Yes and no. The numbers are facts and I respect facts, I measure everything twice. But fit isn't a fact, it's a relationship, and it changes. The body I'm wearing on a Tuesday when something is asked of me is not the body of a slow Sunday morning. A dress that's wrong on Tuesday can be exactly right on Sunday. Same numbers. Different body. The dress knows the difference even when the chart doesn't.
Is there one that got away?
The chamomile dress. A Renaissance-cut silk wedding gown the warm pale of dried chamomile petals, a colour I still haven't found a better word for. It came to me from a life lived in a particular kind of light, all soft gauze and almost-too-much beauty, and I sold it before I understood what it was, because I don't always know what I have until it has already gone. I think about it with some regularity. It arrives in the mind uninvited, the way regret does, while I'm doing something else entirely.
Where does the eye come from?
Repetition, mostly. Handling cloth constantly until one day your hands know things your brain hasn't caught up with yet. And from outside things. Painting, poetry, old films, watching birds. I collect buttons, and sentences, and specific colours that don't have names, none of which fit in a tin but I keep them anyway. The interior world needs company. Cloth is good company.
& from obsession, which is an unfashionable word for a real thing. People imagine discernment arrives like a lightning bolt of certainty. It doesn't. It accumulates, quietly, without announcing itself, the way loose buttons and half-remembered films accumulate, until one day you realise the whole strange library has assembled itself behind your eyes and you can't switch it off.
What do people misunderstand about vintage?
How much happens before it reaches them. It isn't found and sold. It's a whole library built in the head, filmic and costumistic, constantly cross-referenced against everything you've ever handled. Thinking about cloth all of the time. Which I do. I don't know how to stop. Behind every listing is the cleaning, the mending, the visible tip of an enormous, invisible, slightly deranged amount of looking.
What matters most?
That the pieces keep being worn. That their life doesn't stop with me. A garment that reaches me has already survived decades, hands, moths, fashions, and the bin. The pieces should outlast all of us, frankly, passing from body to body, gathering more life.
•