Black Lace Prom Dress In First Post-Wedding Red Carpet Appearance

It was the thing that I called ‘all dressed up and somewhere to because you had a club you could go to, you had somewhere to buy the black lace prom dress, and bands you could see and do the dances to. Club Deluxe started on Haight Street—that helped.It became the norm. You could get on a Muni bus and see somebody in vintage clothes—you weren’t just the weird guy with your grandfather’s hat on.

This was a good thing for San Francisco—dressing up was okay. That’s why a lot of stores in the Haight could get in on it, and we really built itup.You could move to the neighborhood in those days. It was a community. We had the best club, the best bar—Night Break—we had a bowling alley, and a movie theatre, couple places you could buy drugs, and everybody was happy in the Haight.

And right when I was moving, around ’89, a lot of people were saying "you’re lucky you’re getting out now." Why? I said. Crack, they said.Well people found me, and I had a reputation. Bit by bit, costumey stuff crept in. Sunglasses, masks, boas, petticoats. So what made me different from other stores?

I had a good eye and I applied a costume eye to it. I wasn’t just the vintage store where you could buy a '50s dress, but also you could say, "oh, I need some fishnets, I’ll get some fishnets, too". So I became the “wacky Woolworth’s”. I was able to appeal to a lot of different kinds of people.The year I moved to Nob Hill in 2004 was when I decided to change my name to Costume Party.