Fashion Industry Fixture Lynn Yaeger on a Lifetime of Collecting

By The Inside Source
March 23, 2010

Yaeger at home with her Becassine dolls

As anyone in the fashion industry will attest, it's no runway show, no designer presentation, no Fashion Week fete unless Lynn Yaeger is there. A longtime fixture in the style scene, Yaeger was a columnist for the Village Voice for over 30 years who also contributes regularly to Vogue, the New York Times' T magazine and other prominent publications. But what intrigues us most about Yaeger is her penchant for collecting. She skips fashion shows for antique markets (shhh—don't tell!) and her morning ritual involves trolling eBay armed with her shortlist of favorite search terms. Yaeger was kind enough to give us a rare glimpse inside her apartment—a well-appointed showpiece for her collections—and will be joining The Inside Source as a guest columnist. This, the first in a series of four columns, is her personal collecting story. The following articles will feature Yaeger's conversations with other style makers—from designers to boutique owners to antique dealers—on the collectibles that keep them awake at night.

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Here is what I do every single morning, in between teeth-brushing and waiting for the coffee to boil: I turn on my laptop and type “baby locket” into eBay. This is followed by “baby brooch” and then either “sweater 1930-46 (Depression, WWII)” or “antique enamel charm bracelet” or “Becassine doll." I do this because I am an avid, some would argue rabid collector, with a shifting catalog of enthusiasms that at the moment includes vintage cardigans and 1920s bracelets; rag dolls meant to resemble French cartoon characters (the aforementioned Becassine dolls} and Victorian children’s jewelry—the rarer, the more elusive, the less findable, the better.

Why am I searching the four corners of the earth for this old stuff? How is it that these links with the past, these talismans from another time, exert such a powerful pull on my imagination? I can’t pretend to know, but of one thing I am certain: I am not alone in my passions. Plenty of other people—people with excellent jobs, people who are in many cases at least semi-famous—collect all kinds of weird stuff too, though thankfully for me, it isn’t usually Gallic comic strip dolls or shabby reindeer sweaters.

In the next several weeks, I will be interviewing some of these collectors, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of what makes otherwise sane people spend all their money on King George coffee mugs and vintage striptease costumes. They’ll be sharing with me the joys of the hunt, the incredible rush of victory when you get your hands on something you’ve been longing for, and, inevitably, the agony attending the ones that got away. (Speaking of which, if someone reading this is the proud owner of a 19^th century locket decorated with the word “BABY” rendered in rose diamonds that was bought out from under me at the New York Antique Jewelry & Watch Show two summers ago, we need to talk!)

As for me, my collecting started innocently enough, decades ago, with a desire to perk up my house with a couple of interesting geegaws and maybe add a few pieces of old-fashioned glamour to my wardrobe. Back in the day, your only option was to cruise the local flea markets and wait for the occasional antique show to roll in town. Then one day, oh, maybe 12 or so years ago, I was at my desk at the Village Voice when a colleague moseyed over to show me something our new toy, the computer, could do. He typed “Martha Chase doll” (a circa 1910 plaything I was obsessed with at the time) into something called eBay (funny name, right?) and when those doll faces popped up on the screen, my life changed forever.

Who could have predicted that a decade or so later, I would be logged on to French eBay and, using my high school French, managing to procure a badly beat-up Hermes Kelley bag. (Don’t try to tell me that 500 euros isn’t the same as $500, ok? Let me live my fantasy!) A snowy Manhattan morning now finds me duking it out with some phantom under-bidder for a moth-eaten 1950s sweater printed with moose that a Canadian dealer has on offer. (Though there are only two of us in the game, the bidding is something out of that crazy auction scene in Vertigo, unleashing a competitive spirit I didn’t know I had. I get those reindeer in the end, but the battle isn’t pretty.)

Yaeger's Pinocchion and doll collections

Some people think that there is more risk inherent in buying something online, where you can only see a picture of the item, instead of handling the thing in person. To this I can only point to a 1920s Rolex cocktail watch, a tremendously chic item, that I picked up for a song at the Monday morning Covent Garden market during last October’s London Fashion Week. Cut to end of story: this unfixable devil, this vixen of a timepiece, never worked properly for even one single minute, and had to eventually be eviscerated and fitted with a quartz movement. At least if I’d bought it on eBay, I could have left the dealer bad feedback!

But did this balky ticker deter me from further flea-ing? The proof is on my lap right now—a turn-of-the-century two feet tall toy monkey, with leather boots and shoe-button nostrils, that I bought at the Pier Antiques Show a mere 48 hours ago. He may bear the scars of 100 years of hard play, his fur may be flat, his leather smile eroded to a wisp—but he’s safe now, amid the Becassine dolls, broken Rolexes, threadbare Hermes, and other happy residents of the place that I call home.