Vintage Dresses Fit for Film or Flights of Fancy

Suzanne Pettit has a grab-bag employment and romantic history typical of many New Yorkers. She was Woody Allen’s wardrobe supervisor on the 1999 film “Sweet and Lowdown,” she organized benefit bashes for the American Museum of the Moving Image, and she worked with an entrepreneur who created material for the X-Box.She also found her fiancee through a fortuitous Google search – but that comes later in the story.With her 1-year-old vintage clothing store, Psyche’s Tears, Ms. Pettit is following in father’s industrious footsteps. “When I grew up my father was a bit of an entrepreneur,” she says, remembering her childhood in Ohio. “He had a small construction business that was always trying different things. He had a driving range at one point, a coin-operated laundry. He owned a beauty parlor. I just had this sense I wanted to try something on my own.”With business-building on the brain, Ms. Pettit wandered into a vintage clothing shop in the city in the spring of 2003. “I looked at this and thought, I could do this, and I could do this about 10 times better.”When Ms. Pettit, 41, wants something, she acts quickly. More remarkably, she almost always manages to land on her feet. She first moved to New York City on a whim to share an apartment with a friend from Ohio. She was jobless and 22 with a liberal arts degree, and yet she had a job “by Tuesday.”It was no different 20 years later. “I think I made the decision to start the business in about April or May of 2003,” she says, “and it was open by September.”Like many vintage boutiques, her Chelsea store is neat, bright, and homey, with lots of surprise finds. What sets Psyche’s Tears apart is the close-up view: All of the clothes have been laundered and mended. “I wanted a place where people could come in and just wear things right off the rack, and not have to worry about, ‘Oh this is really great but it needs to be hemmed,’ or ‘The button needs to be fixed,’ or whatever… I want people to walk out of here and they can wear their purchases right away.”During a brief stint as a personal shopper, Ms. Pettit had noticed that many people want the look of vintage without the usual experiences associated with shopping for it – “digging through racks and going to the Salvation Army and digging through all the crap to find the one treasure. I thought, well, I have the ability and the experience to go around and to find the treasures. What if I find the treasures, clean them up, and put them all in one place where people can come in and have a nice pleasant experience?”She developed that eye for detail and quality during years of work as a wardrobe supervisor in film, television, and Broadway.Her first feature film, the forgettable 1991 indie “No Telling,” had a small cast and crew, and so the group got to know each other quite well during the six week shoot near Woodstock, N.Y. A young grip named Kermit Cole was among the clan, and she recalls them getting along quite well, though he had a girlfriend at the time and Ms. Pettit was “hung up on someone else.” Several years later, he asked her to do the costumes for a short film he was directing about prehistoric clowns. They bonded again over “fake fur and chicken bones,” but lost touch after the shoot.Ms. Pettit saw him yet again when he worked as a temporary grip on the 1997 Jennifer Aniston movie “Picture Perfect.” This time, Mr. Cole came in to work for just one day – on a wedding scene.Last summer, Ms. Pettit came across her videotape of that prehistoric clown movie, and realized she hadn’t heard from or about Mr. Cole in years. “Usually [in the film industry], you sort of hear what someone’s up to,” she explains. It was as if he had disappeared.When she did a quick Google search, she saw that in fact Mr. Cole had disappeared from the movie business. After directing a critically well received documentary called “Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness,” he had entered a master’s program at Harvard and taken charge of the Wellmet Project, a psychiatric halfway house in Cambridge.When she scrolled down a little further, she saw an Internet page that had Mr. Cole’s e-mail address at the psychiatric house. It was intended for interested readers looking for a place to do live-in volunteering. “I answered the ad and said, ‘Well, I’m not really looking,'” she says now with a smile.Their first date was on August 15.Ms. Pettit wore a hot-pink vintage dress and they strolled around New York together reminiscing about faux-fur clown costumes and discussing their escapes from the film industry.Ms. Pettit, remember, acts swiftly. Though it took them 13 years to realize it, in Mr. Cole she had found a match: On September 25, he took her to the top of the lighthouse on Brewster Island in Boston Harbor and proposed marriage. They’re planning a June wedding and Mr. Cole will move to New York City this spring.As for that volunteer Web site, it’s still the eighth entry when Mr. Cole’s name is typed into Google – but he’s no longer taking proposals of the kind that Ms. Pettit sent his way.

Vintage Dresses Fit for Film or Flights of Fancy

More from the New York Sun

Let Some Oil Tankers Sail Through the Strait of Hormuz — World Oil Prices Will Retreat Big Time

‘What Is Chabad Exactly?’

On Taxes in New York, It’s Mamdani v. Hochul

‘Hoppers’ is the Best Pixar Film of the Decade

Florida Senate Advances Bill To Let State Leaders Designate Groups as Terrorists After Federal Judge Blocks Effort by DeSantis

One Week In, Will Trump and Netanyahu Have Time To Finish Reshaping the Mideast and the World?

State Department Says Charter Flights Are Evacuating Hundreds of Americans Stranded in Middle East

Mayor Mamdani’s Wife Liked Posts Cheering on Hamas’s October 7 Massacre: Report