In Store

Hair and art meet where, once, only pigeons and gothic rockers dared to enter

In an old brick building somewhere between Belltown and downtown, Vain sits in a historic building that once housed the Vogue, a goth nightclub and premier locale for heavy eyeliner and spider dancing back in the mid-nineties. It’s home to different activity these days. “Mommy, will they let me trade for a bright, bright pink one?” a girl of about seven asks her mother, holding an intense fuchsia clip-on hair extension.

Photos by Kyle Johnson

While known first and foremost as a fun and edgy hair salon, Vain is also a multi-part art space, housing a gallery and two stories of affordable artist studios. It’s a salon and a thrift, decor and more store — with a mission.

Owner Victoria Thomas Gentry, whose straight hair falls over her shoulders as she speaks, came from New York in the early nineties with dreams of working in the arts. Tendinitis was driving her out from behind her stylist chair at the time, but she had been taking art courses, appalling professors with her comparisons of color theory in painting and in hair dye. “I didn’t know about running an art community center, but I did know about hair.”

If she was going to start up a salon, she wanted to buck the industry trend of providing increasingly expensive services. Vain is equally in favor of people doing their own streaks as it is of accommodating clients who want high-priced services. It is unwilling to market to people’s insecurities.

If Gentry was unsure of her ability to run an independent art center, grounding a salon in an art space was something she could do. In 2000 Vain moved from a nine-hundred-foot space, where it staged performance art in an alley, to its current luxurious space (with plenty of historic charm) on First Avenue. The building was an abandoned motel and the upper floors only housed a colony of pigeons at the time, but Gentry saw potential. The project sucked up more money than she could ever recoup. Much of the upstairs was powered by a network of extension cords at first. The smell of birds lingered. But in 2003 the artist space gained sponsorship, which paid for a new roof, fixed the electricity and created a residency program.

Now there are twenty work studios housing artists paying under two hundred dollars a month in rent. The space has hosted art openings and parties for the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and is a regular part of First Thursday Art Walk. Due to the popularity of its beauty services, a second Ballard location opened in 2007.
Gentry asserts that there should be more spaces like Vain. “It’s psychological. There is so much creativity in this space — three floors of it. Plus, where else can you see an artist splashed in oil paint walk through the lobby of a salon?” By design, the Vain gallery space, located just off the styling floor, is different from the kind of environment in which people are used to viewing fine art. Frequent gallerygoers must stretch themselves to accept oil painting next to screen print patches, and people unaccustomed to being art patrons can get over any feelings of intimidation.

The most recent show was a kind of recession special with everything priced at fifty dollars or less. Another recent show featured large-scale photographs of defendants in American Civil Liberties Union cases. Gentry loved not only the photographs but also promoting the idea of everyday heroes.

Applying her usual optimism to the economic downturn, she feels this is a time to reexamine priorities. Even though Vain doesn’t currently have the ability to offer the stipend that used to come with its artist residency, she is hopeful the program will be reinstated. “Now is a great time to try new projects, a great time to sign a favorable lease. If you are creative there could be a lot of opportunity in this economic climate.”

VAIN

Hair. Shop. Art.
2018 1st Ave., 206.441.3441, vain.com