Style ambassador: Banks-Blaney marries his intimate knowledge of styles past with his love of contemporary fashion"The manifestation of the shop and of the experience," is how he describes it - it's simple, slick and looks decidedly expensive.
Zoe is in there - she's a guest curator, a section of the site Banks-Blaney is keen to open to celebrity supporters and industry experts. It's also, most importantly, filled with incredible clothes - vintage couture, unknowns and, he excitedly relates, the beaded Bob Mackie gown sported by Sharon Stone as Ginger Rothstein in Martin Scorsese's Casino.
Like any high fashion site, William Vintage will offer worldwide shipping and returns, packaged in custom boxes, wrapped in tissue. The whole works. But it's all being handled in house, a mammoth undertaking, but one Banks-Blaney feels passionately about. "We're not storing everything in warehouse, it's not dealt with by men in dungarees," he emphatically states. "Vintage is always a little bit more effort. You can't say 'Oh I'd love that dress, but I want it in red and I want it in a size six.' It's a process of discovery.
Amal Clooney at the premier of Hail, Caesar!, in a 1981 Yves Saint Laurent dress from William Vintage
That's perhaps why William Vintage's clothing appeals to women who wouldn't be caught dead in something self-consciously dubbed 'vintage'. Women like Kristen Scott Thomas - who, like many actresses, spends a good amount of time in picture-perfect re creations of past eras, but nevertheless chose to wear a 1948 Balmain dress to last year's BAFTAs.
Earlier in the year, at the launch of her film The Other Woman, Kate Upton had looked preened and polished in a mid-century creation by Ceil Chapman - little known but, reportedly, the favourite designer of Marilyn Monroe (fitting for Upton). And earlier this year, Amal Clooney wore a 1981 Yves Saint Laurent haute couture gown to the premiere of Hail, Caesar!. All were, obviously, courtesy of William Vintage, whose proprietor finds vintage treasures at auctions, estate sales, and sometimes by approaching families direct.
Meeting one French dynasty, avid collectors of haute couture, resulted in the unearthing of a 1954 Balmain ballgown in pristine condition: it was preserved in a Parisian cellar, in a Tupperware box.
The vintage matters to Banks-Blaney - and perhaps, to some of his customers, such as Rachel Zoe, an avid enthusiast as well as friend and client who wrote the foreword to a book, 25 Dresses, that Banks-Blaney published last year. But for many, the question of provenance never comes up - rather the basics.
Does it fit? Does it flatter? "My approach as a buyer, and our approach as a company, is to get those pieces where it doesn't matter if it's Saint Laurent for Dior from 1958, or a seamstress-made dress from the 1960s that doesn't have a label in so it's 200 pounds. It's not about value, it's not about designer, it's not about legacy-making.
It's about a garment which has had a life before you've had it," states Banks-Blaney. "And I think there's an amazing magic to that.
Kate Upton at the premier of The Other Woman in 2014, in 1950s Cecil Chapman from William Vintage
Banks-Blaney is staking a bet on that translating out of the flesh and across the Internet --this week, he launched a reconfigured William Vintage website, going live with around 800 pieces, a number set to rapidly climb to 2,000. He dubs it "the net-a-porter of vintage," which describes both the site's aesthetic and the range of product on offer. Like any high-end online retailer, you scroll through an array of several thousand designer dresses.
The difference at William Vintage being that each is entirely unique - vintage haute couture mixing with what he dubs "Great Unknowns". There's a "resort" section of frilled and flounced mid-century bathing suits, for instance, that look remarkably contemporary. Which is the important thing about the site - it makes you look at vintage in a different way. Just like Banks-Blaney, there's no mothballs in site (or scent).
William Vintage has been online before - but, Banks-Blaney states, this is a different proposition entirely. "Our first website really came online to be a tiny representation of what we carried. We never had more than about eighty pieces on it. It was done for two reasons: firstly very quickly, we started to receive quite strong international interest... and it was also putting our foot into the water. When that website launched, we had two people. Including me.
Three years down the line, we've grown a thousand per cent. We're a bigger team, and we've been buying aggressively," he pauses, names a figure spent at one auction, but asks me not to repeat it. Suffice to say, expect great things.
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