I first saw Uni & Vintage, Christine Ekodo-Delaunay's line of extremely limited-production kids' clothes, at Bubble NYC last summer. She started U&V in 2005, and apparently sold it largely through word of mouth and/or by walking it into a few boutiques in Paris. Finally, with the fall collection, it's started appearing online and in a few US stores as well.
Uni & Vintage is made using vintage materials and reworked vintage clothes, so the number of pieces for each design is limited from the get-go. U&V is mostly for girls [there's some boys' shirts coming in the spring], and it's mostly kind of romantic, but it's pretty cool, too. More importantly, I think it represents a great alternative model to both mass-market cloning and fairly meaningless high-end brands [cough, *Burberry, D&G* cough cough].
Whether it's a great or even sustainable business model remains to be seen, of course. [We all remember the late, lamented $395 Manomia Djellabah, don't we?] And the combination of hand-crafting, rare materials, and wholesale mark-ups make for pretty expensive clothing, but it's still kind of awesome. For less-expensive alternatives, you might try trawling through etsy.com to seek out other independent designers directly, though I think the Parisian flair of Uni & Vintage will be hard, if not impossible, to find elsewhere.
Marcel & Paulette have these blouses made from c.1900 lace, for EUR87 [marceletpaulette.com]
Felder & Charles make you choose what kind of mom you are [uh, a mom with a penis?] before seeing either these vintage dot shirts [$100] or this Chevron coat of vintage tweed and fake fur, for, seriously, $650 [felderandcharles.com]
Other US stores with U&V: Space Kiddets, Crembebe, ABC Home [?], Hot Toddie [nyc]; Mochi Blossom, Love [ct]; and Maluka [nj]
These are pretty sweet. Too bad you had to ruin it by telling me the prices.
[maybe it's yen, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's yen. -ed.]