Shop Joy: Idiz Bogam

When, after sixteen years, the Idiz Bogam vintage shop on Dansaert closed its doors, there was a lot of speculation about what Jacqueline Ezman planned to do next. After six months, finally, we know: she has a new shop on Hoogstraat/rue Haute, which now also does furniture.Jacqueline Ezman’s career in vintage retail began back in 1992 with a wee shop on rue Blaesstraat. Four years later she moved to rue Dansaertstraat and all the city’s lovers of past fashions flocked to her for the last sixteen years. After an everything-must-go sale last summer, Ezman said goodbye to Dansaert, where she no longer felt at home with the arrival of an increasing number of big chains. Discreetly, she started work on her new shop, just a few steps away from where it had all started twenty years ago. Ezman went looking for new vintage stuff both in Belgium and abroad, further expanded her own line of clothes, and began altering furniture too. A chair from the late Eighties, for example, was covered with new material, while she shortened its legs with a saw…and finally arrived at a unique vintage item that is hard to place in time. “We don’t live under the dust of the past, after all,” she observes. The new shop is a handsome one: large display windows with elegant mannequins in vintage dresses, stone dogs, and a charming vintage cupboard. Once inside, you will find clothes to the left (for women only, for the moment) and furniture to the right. There is also a kind of coffee bar where you can drink coffee, tea, fruit juice, or champagne on a leopard-print barstool or read a book in a Seventies seat. As well as having her own line of furniture, Ezman also sells work by contemporary artists who have a thing about vintage. That way, as she sees it, their work, instead of gathering dust in a gallery, actually serves a decorative function.

Idiz Bogam ••••
Hoogstraat 180-182 rue Haute, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-512.10.32
ma/lu/Mo > za/sa/Sa 11 > 19.00, zo/di/Su 11 > 18.00