Southern Junkers Vintage Market

Southern Junker Vintage Market
Creator & Founder Ruth Barnes

Southern Junkers Vintage Market is a quarterly event complete with about 65 antique & vintage vendors, concessions and food trucks, art and decorating demos and of course, appearances by the Memphettes.

Originally created as a Facebook community page for people who love antiques, vintage and repurposed items Southern Junkers has evolved into a top notch, high quality shopping event for those of us who love antiquing. 

I first became familiar with Southern Junkers when they were hosting an outdoor flea market event in 2012. My love of vintage drives me to not only purchase old stuff but to encourage The Mister to refurbish and repurpose forgotten pieces for me. You know, to “save” them from the dumpster. I guess you could describe my home décor style as pintrest-kitsch meets an episode of Hoarders. Southern Junkers, to me, had become that place to find that special starter piece for one of my projects.

The Selection of items you will find at Southern Junkers

When the Memphettes became involved with Southern Junkers it was due to the event's expansion and move into the Memphis Agri-Center International. Part of the expansion included entertainment for the guests which came in the form of a Vintage Fashion Show. The first time up we may have aimed too high…one hour long with over 100 outfits with ukuleles and a pirate…ummm…yeah…we overshot a bit. So to Ruth I would like to say I am grateful you found us and invited us but also allowed us to come back and continue to participate in these events. 

Outfits from our first vintage fashion show!

and from our second show which was Rockabilly /
Western themed and full of campy goodness

Southern Junkers Vintage Market has definitely grown into a wonderful shopping and antiquing experience. But, I must comment here with the growth of the market I have noticed more completed, fully restored items versus the starter pieces I have come to look for with this market. There are still plenty of vintage items for a retro gal like me but the selection of these items was smaller this time. So sadly, this time around I must admit my group of ladies and gents purchased less and I found myself breezing past booths which were stocked with those fully restored pieces. Southern Junkers has become an interior decorators dream market, but not so much the vintage lifestyle market I normally shop at. While Southern Junkers is an enjoyable event I do kind of miss the original format where I was able to find pieces I could repurpose with my own flair vs something already upcycled in someone else's style. 

OK so now about our fashion show. This last market represented out third endeavor in the fashion show circuit. This time around we decided to break away from traditional and create something unique for the audience. We went with a multi-media fashion show which integrated on stage models with a series of short silent movies. This time the focus of the fashion show was to highlight trends of the silent movie era and we did so by making our own silent films. It was a lot of fun now enjoy some photos of the market…

A decorators paradise!!

Wait WHAT?…your article is over with just a quick mention of the short films? Well that is a topic all by itself and I plan to share an entire post about the creation and showing of these films. This is what the industry calls a cliffhanger. 

So until next time kids, stay in school, eat your veggies, and listen to your mom when she's talking. See you in the next episode.