Cars, furniture, fashion, jewellery, dance and even cakes will be on display at the first ever Vintage Fashion and Décor Fair which takes place in Salthill’s Galway Bay Hotel on September 12.

The event is the brainchild of Dubliner Joan Murray who is organising it in conjunction with Galway woman Zara Nugent and it promises to transport participants to an elegant world of style and glamour, offering a brief respite from the current climate of doom and gloom and scary credit ratings.

“Vintage has had a high profile in recent years,” says Joan, explaining that the term embraces anything from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Her own professional background is in organising antique fairs but she has had an interest in vintage fashion since her student days.

The Trinity graduate, who did a degree in languages and then travelled extensively before returning home to the recession of the 1980s, started running antique fairs while she held down a day job as a bar manager.

When it comes to antiques, she’s not really a collector and her role is mostly organisational. But her interest in vintage fairs is born out of a personal passion for vintage fashion and she has organised three similar fairs in Dublin since April 2009.

Her aim is to create an event in Galway that will embrace everything retro. It’s her first show outside Dublin and she felt that Galway was ideal, firstly because she loves it, but also because it has a great reputation for style and energy and it has so many vintage shops.
Her assistant event manager for the day will be Zara Nugent from Salthill. Joan met Zara when the younger woman was studying fashion event management at Sallynoggin College after graduating from NUIG.

“She is capable and organised and has good taste and was the first person I contacted when I decided to come to Galway,” says Joan.
The Vintage Fashion and Décor Fair will feature over 30 dealers and fashion experts from Galway and further afield, says Joan who is amazed by the amount of vintage dealers in Ireland.

“When I started advertising initially a lot of people contacted me and certainly in the past year there have been a lot of new businesses.”
She feels that’s because there is a growing community who are interested in sustainable fashion and quality, citing people like Kinvara-based artist Chris Banahan who has recently become interested in restoring and recreating vintage furniture.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.