Is Hazzel Svvengar riding the new wave of fashion acquisition? Maybe.
In a world awash in stuff, how do you find the one thing you are looking for? That one specific item that fits your core aesthetic whether it’s cottage core, dark academia or my personal favorite, granny core. The more than average discerning shopper, knowing the look she/he/they is/are going for, needs someone to sort through an onslaught of individual items to get to the much smaller percentage of material that actually matters. Enter Svvengar.
The young fashion savvy retailer abandoned an early career in mainstream fashion to become an eco-friendly curator with her own store. Now she spends a large part of her time sifting through every imaginable clothing source from thrift stores to estate sales searching for iconic objects and clothing. “People always want to know where I get my things and the answer is literally everywhere,” she says.
“You’ll see that word, curated, thrown around a lot in Portland vintage thrift shops,” she says, “especially because thrifting and second hand clothes definitely used to have a big (negative) connotation.”
But Svvengar means curated in exactly the way the art museum does, “There’s so much second hand stuff out there – so much that stores like Goodwill, Value Village and Salvation Army are exploding with stuff,” says Svvengar. She separates the wheat from the chaff so her customers don’t have to.
While a lot of what Forager Vintage sells is used, the shop definitely doesn’t look and feel like a junk store. “A curated shop has an aesthetic or a color palate or feeling or maybe a type of fabric or, like for me, an era,” she says, “So we mostly have 70’ to 90’s and we do earth tones and casual stuff instead of gowns and dressy, high end fashion. We’re a lot more accessible.”
While she supports the mission of recycling, she’s quick to point out that she also buys things from local artists and from other sources . “It’s a secondhand shop mostly,” she says,”And then there’s also some little gifty things, to kind of spice up your outfit or add to that cozy, warm, welcoming feeling at home.”
Like other emerging retailers in the downtown core, Svvengar has faced down the enormous challenges of operating a shop in an uncertain environment. She picked March of 2020 to first open up and recalls she was open just one week before the national shutdown. She relied on online sales to get by for the first two years but now that she’s reopened her doors, she’s excited to see that business is picking up.
“I’m looking forward to being here for a long time,” she says.
Forager Vintage, 12570 SW Broadway, foragervintagepdx.gmail.com