Strike Your Fancy at All-Purpose
Catty-corner from the Capital Candy Jar on 15th, Chanel Grandison has the door to All-Purpose Vintage (1445 Constitution Ave. NE) open, letting the sounds of the music playing reach out like fingers to entice visitors inside.
She greets those entering with a glass of champagne and insightful commentary about their accessories (“Oh! I love your purse! Vintage Coach! I have one myself”), as someone else emerges from the fitting room, pushing aside the velvet curtains. A woman steps out in a fully sequined black blazer. “This,” she tells Grandison as she pivots from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and back again, “is coming home with me.”
“It should. It’s classic. Did you see the buttons?” Grandison asks, pointing out the pearls, obviously familiar with the piece. “And the nipped waist!”
Grandison opened her little corner vintage shop, All-Purpose, on March 15. It features black-and-white checkerboard floors, upholstered footstools, a chandelier and a counter that bears a striking resemblance to an art crate.
Here you’ll find carefully curated selection of vintage clothing, shoes, streetwear, bags, a few records —really, anything that strikes her fancy.
It’s an eclectic collection, but Grandison’s fancy has high standards. She picks up only the items that she thinks are timeless, that show exceptional craftsmanship and high quality. They’re pieces of art with interesting history and stories that she believes aren’t over yet.
A Love for The Hunt
A former educator, Grandison grew up in the Trinidad neighborhood, graduating from Dunbar before she went to college in North Carolina and then University of DC. She became an educator, first in DC Public Schools and then AppleTree Public Charter, most recently working at Center City.
At the same time, started to think about what she really wanted to do with her life. “What would I do for free? I would rummage estate sales and thrift stores for free seven days a week,” she decided.
So she struck out to see if she could make a business out of it. In 2024, Grandison started bringing smaller selections of vintage items to Eastern Market and Georgetown Flea, trying to determine if people would buy what she already loved.
She credits her grandparents with her interest in vintage, the style of her Nana and her godmother in particular. It was that quality she wanted to wear herself.
But when Grandison went go shopping, she said, “nothing looks like this stuff in my head. And so, it’s like, where I am gonna go?”
Flummoxed, she went back to family. She asked her older sister to take her to the thrift store. Grandison and her sister would bond as they paged through the racks, falling in love with the hunt. It was a love that stuck with her through college, she said, “to bring in the things that are timeless.”
Grandison started curating for her shop in 2023, working her way through estate sales and thrift shops up and down the East Coast. These days, she also has a vendor in Japan and connections in Florida. Altogether, she opened her brick and mortar with about $100,000 of inventory in hand. It could fill the store about five times over.
Second-hand shopping has become a hot business, growing 7 times as fast as retail overall,—by 11 percent in 2023, the year Grandison became curating. It’s especially popular among millennials who like to hunt for treasure, dedicating hours of time to finding a perfectly worn t-shirt or a deal on a brand-name bag in the name of unique style and sustainability.
Vintage costs a bit more than thrift, Grandison acknowledges. But for good reason.
For starters, a person doesn’t have to search through a rack of discarded fast-fashion for unique, quality or brand-name items.
“The benefit of vintage shops is that myself and any vendor that you will see here or outside on an event day has done the work to make sure that they are pulling out what their eye sees as the best quality and craftsmanship of any number of eras, of any number of designers, and just thought, you know, provoked, thought provoking and immensely creative figures who have contributed these various things to us and pulled them out,” she said.
And Grandison travels multiple times a year, selecting pieces that maintain their original quality, pricing them in a way that is accessible. For instance, a 100 percent silk designer blouse of artisan craftsmanship could cost more than $300 new, she said. You can find an Orvis blouse from the 1990s in impeccable shape for between $80 and 100.
“You’re not paying what the original buyer did,” she explains, “you are paying a fraction of that cost of an item that still maintains the same level of quality,” at the same time picking up a unique, crafted item that carries a history.
Come for the Objects, Stay For Their Stories
All-Purpose is filled with interesting and fabulous things. A vintage Louis Vuitton Speedy Duffle in the famous white leather check. 1930s diamond bezel gold-filled Jules Jurgensen watch, never worn, still in the box with its manual. A double-sided photo pendant that will rotate in its frame; on one side of the convex central piece is a photo of Robert F. Kennedy; on the other, Martin Luther King, Jr.
But while you might come for the things, you’ll stay for their stories. Grandison likes to tell people about the pieces, “what that blouse did and where that vase was, and where that purse has been, and who has said cheers with those glasses over there.”
Some of the items have been props —All-Purpose has been providing pieces to local productions. She’s been channeling her background in theatre and her deep interest in history as she does background research on the items, digging deep and falling down rabbit holes so that knows each one like a friend.
In her shop, Grandison picks up a depression-era rose gold tea cup and saucer. The imprint is “ballerina”, she tells me, so-called because it was supposedly designed for the dancer Isadore Duncan. “She’s just perfect for a dainty class of tea for the lady at home or the gentleman,” Grandison said, miming a sip of her personified crystal.
She touches the sleeve of a pristine gold Escada bomber jacket, “so thick and crazy good,” she said, pointing out the gold leather and silk lining and especially the details of buttons and closures.
The jacket is proof that Escada was “really, really killing it in the 80s and 90s,” Grandison said –and still knocks them dead on the street forty or fifty years later.
Community at the Heart
But for Grandison, the biggest reason to shop —and sell— vintage is community. The minute she walked into the space that is now All-Purpose, she said, “I could see my vision being executed.”
“I could see myself having conversations with interesting people and being able to build a sense of community that just welcomes everyone and hopefully invites people to say something to someone that they wouldn’t otherwise,” Grandison re.
For her, All-purpose is a space where community can be the lead with beautiful things around them, “you know —haphazardly, almost like, yes — because this is what I do.”
Grandison welcomes other vendors to sell out of the space; right now, you can find items from Salmar Studio. On Saturdays, she’ll host vendor tables on the plaza on her corner, a chance for people to sip and shop and grow together. “Let’s keep lifting each other up because that how we do best,” she said.
All-Purpose Vintage, 1445 Constitution Ave. NE, Open Studio Thursday 1 to 6 p.m., Fri to Sat 12 to “7ish” p.m. allprpcos.co. Follow on Insta: @all.prps
