Let me first say, despite the title of this rant, that I am totally, utterly, disgustingly in love with all things vintage and have been for as long as I can remember...but...
I am getting really, really pissed off with how popular vintage has become. It now often makes much more sense, economically speaking, to purchase modern interpretations (read: knock-offs) of vintage items - clothes, jewellery, furnishings etc. Proper vintage items are now usually so highly prized and therefore priced that they are no longer the poor person's preserve when wanting to a) not spend a fortune and b) find something a bit different. I've loved vintage over the years because I like to think of the history, both personal and social, behind the item and the quality of vintage items can be so much better than modern goods.
I've never really had a particular aesthetic that I've adhered to. I recently realised that the one thing I tend regularly to admire is something that is very 'of its time'. This doesn't necessarily mean that I'm always attracted to tasteful, ultra-chic, iconic pieces like the Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona chair, for example. Actually, that's precisely the sort of thing I take an 'I can appreciate the classic, timeless and yet ground-breaking design of this piece' attitude towards but I would never buy it and put it in my home. I'm a sucker for thirties dressing table sets, forties floral jewellery, fifties meringue-meets-Fairy-Princess-Barbie dresses, sixties psychedelia, and the kind of thing that Margot Leadbetter would be seen snobbing around in at a dinner party. In other words, I'm quite open to finding charm in a splash of kitsch weirdity and a touch of ethnic oddness.
To return for a moment to a previous pet topic, I noticed today that Kirstie Allsopp has a line of soft furnishings in an oldey-worldey, heritagey, vintagey style. Interesting. So, Ms. It's-always-better-to-buy-vintage-because-modern-is-a-load-of-tacky-balls-that-everyone-else-has-got-anyway, explain that one!
What was I on about again? Oh yeah, vintage being popular. Ok, so this is not exactly a new thing; it really got going around 2003/2004 when all the magazines went a bit gooey over pre-war English heritage and fifties prom styles and took on a dressing-up is the new dressing up look. It was around then that I noticed grubby retro clothing stores started dry-cleaning their garments and 'arranging' their brickabrack, and putting up the prices accordingly. This stage wasn't too bad because it was still possible to pick up fabulous things for a fraction of the equivalent high-street cost. I used to supplement my vintage shopping with routing around in the family dressing up bags and cleaning up my Mum's lovely old dresses and skirts. If I went to a party, I would almost invariably be wearing something old. Nowadays, it's hard to track down decent, truly vintage pieces, rather than random bits of rubbish from a few seasons ago.
I've recently purchased two fifties style dresses from River Island (somewhere I've hated for aeons because their stock is usually entirely vulgar) and I was honestly shocked because they are pretty well-made, 100% cotton and have a properly full circle skirt...all for forty-odd quid a pop. I would never, ever find a vintage dress that good for that kind of money these days. That's a bit sad. I've been routing around in the odd charity shop now and there just aren't the golden finds of yore to be had or at least they've become much rarer. Maybe that's it though: when I do find something, I will treasure it more because of its rarity. Or maybe I'll just be secretly seething at all those utter bastards who've got 'a little man who goes around and finds things' for them, and consequently have a wardrobe full of Dior New Look style pieces, floral brooches and tapestry handbags. Feckers.
