By Hannah Barricks
Photography by Crystal Wise
Carolyn Young spent 34 years cleaning other people’s homes. Somewhere along the way, she became very good at finding the things other people had left behind.
Friends noticed.
“Carolyn, you find the coolest stuff,” Young remembers them telling her. “You should try to open up a spot.”
Eventually, she did.
Young first tested the idea with a small booth in Glen Rose, filling it with the vintage pieces she had long been drawn to. Then COVID arrived, sales stalled and the inventory came home with her, where it sat for months.
The detour ultimately brought Young to Camp Bowie Boulevard. Encouragement from fellow vintage retailer Laura Simmons helped convince her to take the considerably larger leap from booth to storefront. After a lengthy build-out, Young opened Iota around her 60th birthday.
Today, the roughly 900-square-foot shop at 4912 Camp Bowie Blvd. has a 1,400-square-foot warehouse behind its rotating inventory. New pieces arrive in the store daily.
Finding them is part treasure hunt, part neighborhood network. Young and Taryn Tompkins, her son Levi’s longtime girlfriend and the former’s business partner and co-owner, shop estate and garage sales, but customers also regularly arrive carrying clothes cleared from their own closets or the homes of mothers and grandmothers. Iota buys its inventory rather than consigning it, then inspects, cleans and repairs pieces before they reach the floor.
The result can be wonderfully unpredictable: designer silk beside old denim, elaborate eveningwear, hand-painted jackets and pieces whose labels matter less than the fact that somebody at Iota thought they were good.
“We’re not sticklers on dates,” Tompkins says. “If we like it, we go for it.”
That looseness is intentional. Young calls Iota’s approach “modern vintage,” leaving room for newer finds while reflecting the way she actually dresses. She would rather mix an old piece with contemporary shoes than look as though she stepped straight out of another decade.
“I like to mix my stuff so I don’t feel like I’m wearing a costume,” Young says.
Tompkins takes the philosophy a step further: Don’t wait for an occasion worthy of the clothes.
“Just go for it. Wear it,” she says. “Just love it and live in it.”
To Tompkins, wearing vintage is a little like collecting objects for a home. A piece picked up while traveling or inherited from someone else carries a story that mass-produced sameness cannot reproduce. Vintage, she says, can do the same thing for a wardrobe.
At Iota, evidence of a previous life isn’t necessarily a defect. The faded outline of a wallet can date a pair of men’s jeans; newer denim might carry the rectangular ghost of a cellphone. A missing button, loose seam or stain may simply require patience before a garment gets another turn.
“It is a labor of love,” Young says.
For a woman who opened the doors at 60, that second-life philosophy applies rather neatly to more than the clothes.
“I get to do this,” Young says. “This is not something I have to do.”
And perhaps that is the best reason to wear the good vintage now, too.