About Red Vintage Co.
When Nina Collins was in sixth grade, her mother routinely dropped her off at a giant thrift store outside LA with her brothers, two of them her triplet siblings, all gingers. They got around $4 a piece to supplement their wardrobes. “Pretty much everything was 25 cents,” says Nina.
A few decades passed, couture made its way to her closet, but vintage held strong. Then, in 2019, while she and her brother Charlie were road-tripping from Santa Fe to LA, the idea of Red Vintage was hatched. It was somewhere between Needles and Barstow as far as either can remember.
With an eye for authenticity and kitsch, quality and cool, Nina personally selects every piece of Red Vintage inventory from a carefully cultivated network of sources. Yes, she knows about fabric content and how 50-50 poly-cotton drapes differently than pure cotton, and which brands began manufacturing in far-off lands when. But she chooses clothes as much for their personal stories as their retail bona fides—about 90% of the RV collection is US-made.
“I’m drawn to the good, the bad, the ugly and the absurd,” she says. “The more stains the better. I love the history of the wear and tear, imagining what the rocker tee or fringed jacket or torn jeans went through before I found them. If something’s really beaten up, it was probably well-loved. I want to find it a forever home!”
The same sentiment led Nina to adopt Mike (in Retirement), her senior terrier and warehouse muse (a child’s XS tee gives Mike a bespoke fit) and bring Tony, her carrot (and carrot-top) loving Oldenburg horse into the fold. Outside the warehouse and the ring, Nina teaches Ashtanga, which she’s practiced for fifteen years. She hopes someday to find a mechanic who can get her 1965 Cushman Truckster, an auction find, back on the road.
