About Us

Hi! I'm Jessica and I love going on adventures to find unusual vintage clothing, I'm the owner of Smoking Gun Vintage & this is my new online store! 

A little bit about the story of how I started Smoking Gun & my journey with vintage treasure hunting!

The start

Turn the clock back to 2010 and I was living alone in London, a bit of a luxury for a graduate in the middle of a recession who was getting paid £30 a day to work in a vintage shop in Camden. Unsurprisingly the ends were not meeting. I was also suffering from a particularly bad spate of heartbreak.

One day I packed approximately 15 items from my own wardrobe into a suitcase and trundled it down to Brick Lane Vintage Market on the bus. I nervously placed them around the big steel stall frame and began to chat to the other traders around me. By the end of the weekend I pretty much sold everything I had, and had made a whole host of new friends who turned into my new family and acted as a bandaid for my broken heart.

Fast-forward a decade, a landslide of trials and errors, a few terrible, costly mistakes, a couple of triumphs, some lucky breaks and a whole host of blood, sweat and tears, Smoking Gun Vintage is going strong. We have our flagship shop in Brick Lane Vintage Market (yes I am still there!), Our gorge new Hastings Shop, Festivals, Etsy & now our new Online Store!

The times when I am at my happiest are when i’m in an unfamiliar place, hunting down bargains. When I found myself in Joshua Tree I took five days to visit every Thrift Shop in town (mostly on foot due to the lack of Ubers). When I was in Goa I collected pastel coloured nighties from the street market for £1 each and got a local man with a sewing machine to make them into crop tops for me.

When I went to a wedding in the South of France we hired a van and drove there, visiting every flea market and charity shop we could find on the way. I love curating these ‘collections’ which tell stories from the places and the people they belonged to before. I love the stories behind the clothes. Us vintage traders are not known for sharing such secrets, but I don’t like to go back to the same place more than once for the most part, so it seems greedy for me to keep these discoveries to myself.

I hope you find some gorgeous new vintage treaures in my new online shop!

Jessica x.