Uffner, Helen

Helen Uffner has dressed Broadway, Hollywood and TV shows for more than 40 years. But high-rise developers and Amazon distribution centers are making it impossible to store her extraordinary vintage collection.Helen Uffner began her love affair with old clothes as a young teenager, wandering into estate sales near her family’s home in Queens, unnerving her father, who had immigrated to this country as a Holocaust survivor and worried that people would think he could not afford to outfit his daughter properly. As a high school student in the mid-1960s, she would go to auction houses in Greenwich Village to buy vintage clothes and antique jewelry, using her babysitting earnings. With the prospect of a career in period fashion lacking promise, she sensibly joined a management consultancy after college. Soon enough the sexism got to her so she quit and decided to monetize her passion, drawing from the large collection she had already amassed which, at the time, focused on Victorian lingerie.Over the next 40 years or so, Ms. Uffner established a celebrated business renting out vintage clothes to theater, film and television productions from an inventory considered unparalleled. Initially, she ran the business out of her apartment — supplying the wardrobe for “Out of Africa,” “Zelig,” “The Color Purple.” By the late 1990s, when that model was no longer sustainable, she moved to a 6,000-square-foot space in the garment district, which made it easy for Broadway costume designers to visit and for actors to come in for fittings. Within a decade though, the unforgiving pace of real estate development in New York would threaten her viability, and now, in an all-too-familiar scenario, the pandemic economy was taking an extinction-level toll.It was a paradox though because even as the performing arts have suffered immeasurably during the past two years, film and television production in New York City has mostly returned to prepandemic levels and is ramping up. In September, Netflix opened a 170,000-square-foot studio in Brooklyn, and Ms. Uffner has been involved with one of the most anticipated series of the year, “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes’s follow-up to “Downton Abbey,” set in turn-of-the-century New York (and starting Monday on HBO).Challenges began for Ms. Uffner in 2006, when the landlord of the building she occupied in Midtown “invited” her, as she put it, to break her lease early. He was selling the building and wanted her out, but moving thousands of racks of clothing was going to be an ordeal. At the same time commercial rents were soaring and the city’s garment industry had all but disappeared, large loft-like spaces given over to corporate offices. Eventually, in 2008, Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing moved to Long Island City, after its proprietress faced fines of $1,000 a day if she did not vacate her existing space.The transition was not easy. Fashion houses, which also rent from the collection as a means of inspiration, began returning things by FedEx, Ms. Uffner told me, “as if we were in another state.” But over the next several years, Long Island City became popular enough that it was now a place where a marketing executive at Ralph Lauren might actually live. So by 2018, Ms. Uffner inevitably found herself in the same predicament she had faced earlier — the building she was in near Queens Plaza would be redeveloped and she would have to move. She ultimately settled into another space in Long Island City only to confront the drama all over again — her current building is planned for demolition to accommodate the construction of a high-rise.In the past, Ms. Uffner had several competitors, also independently owned, but nearly all have fallen away. If she shut down, the impact on the costume industry would be profound. Tom Broecker, an Emmy Award-winning costume designer who has relied on Ms. Uffner for decades described her collection of women’s wear from the early 20th century as extraordinary. “In the entire world, Helen is the only person who has cotton dresses from that period,” he told me.Even a move to Industry City, in Brooklyn, where the city has been trying to revive garment manufacturing, would be difficult from his point of view. In addition to film and theater projects, Mr. Broecker works on “Saturday Night Live,” where he might have to come up with a piece of old clothing in a span of two hours, making a trip from Rockefeller Center to a semi-inaccessible quarter of Brooklyn unfeasible.Understanding the importance of her enterprise to New York’s creative life, the city via the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment has said it is trying to help Ms. Uffner relocate, but without broad commercial rent regulation, there is little that can be accomplished. Over the years, she told me, landlords have added fees to monthly rent bills with impunity. In the beginning she was paying rent, electricity and property tax. In a subsequent space, the landlord added gas, and then came requirements to contribute to the local business improvement district.While Covid has tanked the price of office leasing, vast warehouse space of the kind Ms. Uffner needs is at a premium because of the demand coming from Amazon and other e-commerce sites that have become even more attractive to consumers during the pandemic. The city suggested a space in Hudson Yards, she told me, that was going to cost more than five times what she was paying.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More