After closing briefly to knock out a wall, Irene Patalan has expanded Collected Works, near the Farmers’ Market, into the former Lily’s Garden (the flower shop moved down the street near Zingerman’s last year.)

Since 1977, Patalan has been following the strain of women’s fashion that might be called high-end hippie, except Patalan won’t call it that. “No one used that word. It was just what was happening to young people.”

Patalan herself exemplified what was happening to young people: she and her husband Rich Thompson spent a few years on a communal farm in northern Michigan in the early 1970s. By mid-decade, he was selling candles to small boutiques, and Patalan was a teacher looking for a job with more flexible hours so she could have kids.

She opened Collected Works on Liberty in 1977, opposite Seva and up the block from the Sun Bakery, selling all-natural fabrics at a time when conventional fashion “was a sea of polyester. Think John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. I sold only cotton, silk, linen, wool, and natural rayon. We used to sell silk stockings, back when we could get them.” Around 1990 she moved to Main Street, still selling only natural fibers, and to her present space in the Market Place building in 2000. Around that time, she began to notice that synthetics had changed: “Microfiber is so different from that oily polyester of the 70s.” She refocused her store on American designers who were making the arty, unstructured garments, often decorated with applique or embroidery, that she’d always sold but that were now sometimes using high-quality synthetics. Bryn Walker, URU, and Cynthia Ashby are some of the designers she promotes.

An Eileen Fisher dress hanging on her clearance rack at first seems an odd mass-market anomaly, but Patalan explains it’s vintage Eileen Fisher, recently discovered in storage. Patalan says hers was the first store in Ann Arbor to carry Eileen Fisher: “Of course, then it was Eileen Fisher New York. Now her clothes are made in China.”

Patalan, an Ann Arbor schools trustee, is still married to Thompson. “He’s still a great salesman,” says Patalan, though he no longer sells candles–he works for Mr. Roof. They had those children. She brought them to work until they were old enough to go to school, and her customers watched them grow up. Now, on request, they can admire photos of her three grandchildren.

Collected Works, 303 Detroit St. (Market Place), 995-4222. Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sun. 1-4 p.m.