What is a vintage item , a dress, say, or a cup or a handbag? It is historical artefact and personal possession; itâs not in a museum behind glass, it is next to your skin, or held against your lips, or carried with you wherever you go. As a used item it holds something of its previous owners inside itself, which in turn imbues it with emotion and value. That âsomethingâ may be a smell or a physical clue such as a hair or a stain; or it may be a name or story, or just a feeling. It is a ghost, but you can hold it in your hands.
It could be unique, or rare, even if it is dusty and unloved when you first see it. You might have not seen another like it in 10 years of collecting, and you may guess that you wonât see another exactly like it in your lifetime. Even if it was mass produced maybe it was much loved or much used and so more likely to have been broken and never made its long journey into the present. Thatâs why so few of certain things survive. So it is a time traveller. It holds the power to evoke a lost era, lost lives, and forgotten ways. It fills us with the joy, pleasure, regret, thwarted desires, and sadness which constitute nostalgia. âNostalgiaâ is from the Greek, with nostos meaning to return home, and algia meaning a painful condition. Living with vintage is about memory (our own and othersâ), the trajectory of autobiography and self, and about constant changes balanced by carefully guarded continuities. It is what Tim Edensor (2008, p. 324) describes as the absent presence and Ben Highmore (2011, p. 82) calls âa snapshot from the perspective of eternityâ.
The rise of vintage is in tandem with what Sharon Macdonald (2013, p. 168) argues is âthe musealisation of everyday lifeâ, such as in folk life heritage museums such as Beamish in the UK but also âwhich have flourished especially in parts of Europe that are relatively marginal within late capitalismâ (ibid., p. 191). This kind of âmemory preoccupationâ (ibid., p. 123) has given rise to a proliferation of museums from the large to the tiny (such as the Bakelite museum in Somerset in the UK), memorials, family histories, memoirs from the self-published âperson in the streetâ to those âbyâ celebrities but actually ghostwritten, heritage projects, and re-enactment societies.
Wearing, buying, and living with vintage is increasingly a theme all around us, popping up on TV, in the media, in books. There are a plethora of âhow to style your homeâ or âhow to style yourselfâ books and coffee table books. The novel The Improbability of Love (Rothschild 2015) is about provenance and the history (indeed, the character and opinions) of an old item, a small painting dating from the eighteenth century. The Nakano Thrift Shop (Kawakami 2016) is a Japanese novel about the characters in a second-hand shop in a suburb of Tokyo. As the owner of the shop explains to the narrator: ââthese are not antiques, theyâre second hand goodsâ ⊠The shop was crammed with the kind of items found in a typical household from the 1960s and later.â There are articles in newspapers about men or women whose homes and attire are entirely vintage. The âRaincoatsâ episodes of US television series Seinfeld (CBS 1994) was an early reference to second-hand clothes accruing monetary value. Students at my place of work are currently (at spring 2017) planning to open and run a âcampus thrift shopâ and are appealing for volunteers and donations. Every month in the UK magazine Homes and Antiques, there are references to how collectors like the story and provenance of items. For example, three mentions of an item âtelling a storyâ in the July 2016 issue; and in the March 2017 issue, âIâve always been drawn to things with a sense of history. It just doesnât excite me to buy new.â This kind of choice denotes a level of choice and privilege, about having the time and money to search, but also shows an interest in seeking the ghosts in things.
As Elizabeth E. Guffey (2006) tells us, âthe resurgence of interest in the art and design of the late nineteenth century suggests the beginning of a unique post-war tendency: a popular thirst for the recovery of earlier, and yet still modern, periods at an ever-accelerating rateâ (Guffey 2006, p. 8). There are, of course, many epochs in history when design has co-opted earlier periods such as the Grecian revival in the 1890s, or the Egyptian revival in the 1920s, where Egyptian motifs were used in architecture, decorative arts, clothes, jewellery, and furniture. This craze was inspired by Howard Carterâs discovery of Tutankhamunâs tomb, but there were earlier similar crazes, such as when Napoleon conquered Egypt in the late 1700s. So there is evidence that humans have always appreciated earlier design styles. Old things, such as clothes, speak to us. As Elizabeth Wilson (1985, p. 1) notes:
We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves. For clothes are so much a part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on a display in the [costume museums] they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening; the atrophy of the body and the evanescence of life.
Even the most âout of fashionâ style is likely to return to being in vogue, given long enough. However, as both Guffey (2006) and Angela McRobbie (1994) point out, revival is now at an ever-increasing speed; and unlike nineteenth-century revivalism such as that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John Ruskin, and Augustus Pugin, retro or vintage styles do not look to the distant past. Instead, we turn to the recent past, often within living memory such as the continued popular interest in clothes which belonged to famous women and which represent to us both the icon herself and an era, for example, Jacqueline Kennedyâs clothes at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001; and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Kylie Minogueâs outfits (2007); The Supremesâ performance outfits (2008); and Grace Kellyâs clothes including her wedding dress (2010) and clothing worn by Twiggy, Sandy Shaw, and others from the 1960s (2016).
But many of the cultural icons and preoccupations of the 1930s onwards occupy us still, for example, in 2015 The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that âMax Factor has appointed Marilyn Monroe as its new âglobal ambassadorâ, leaving some people bemused at the idea of selecting an ambassador who has been dead since 1962 ⊠But Monroe represents just what Max Factor wants to resuscitate: the glamour for which the company was once a byword ⊠âMarilyn made the sultry red lip, creamy skin and dramatically lined eyes the most famous beauty look of the 1940s, and itâs a look that continues to dominate the beauty and fashion industry. It is the ultimate look that defines glamour â nothing else compares,â the spokeswoman saidâ (Churchwell 2015). Using cosmetics, surgery, and hair dye, the legend has it that âNorma Jeane was changed by someone else into the glamorous movie star Marilyn Monroeâ (ibid.). But what was the âglamourâ of Monroe, a woman so crippled by self-doubt that she was famous for arriving late on set, always wishing to find love and ultimately for (possibly?) fatally overdosing. Her death was over half a century ago, and yet still we are transfixed by her. Similarly, Superman and Wonder Woman, first drawn in the 1930s and 1940s, respectively, are both the subjects of recent films, as part of a wider revival of DC Comicsâ and Marvel Comicsâ characters, and yet are still somehow relevant to us today.
What Is Vintage?
There is an ever-increasing interest in âvintageâ as an academic subject, with most of the studies being about design, consumption, and retailing, such as studies about âretroâ retailers (Crewe et al. 2003; McColl et al. 2013; Baker 2012, 2013) or consumers (Cassidy and Bennett 2012; Cervellon et al. 2012; Dowling Peters 2014; Hansson and Brembeck 2015). For example, Lauren Dowling Peters (2014) studies the shoppers who attend the Brooklyn flea market, and Hansson and Brembeck (2015) study the Gothenburg flea market, with attendant issues of authenticity and performance of knowledge. McRobbie (1994), Jenns (2004, 2015), Veenstra and Kuipers (2013), and Fischer (2015) also examine issues about authenticity. Tracy Diane Cassidy and Hannah Rose Bennett (2012, p. 240) argue that the rise of vintage is a result of the current economic climate, as well as a change in attitudes about old clothes and other items, vintage nods in current fashion collections, a reaction against âfast fashionâ, and a lack of individuality. Fred Davis, writing in 1979 about nostalgia, sees âretroââthat which we often now call vintageâas an upheaval of taste, and a shake-up of the messages and meanings of second hand. Davisâs understanding of the appeal of retro lay in the hippie culture of the 1960s when a generation of young adults set out to unpin ideas about what was tasteful or acceptable and to challenge the messages and meanings of their social and cultural worlds. âThe attributes of retro, its self-reflexiveness, its ironic reinterpretation of the past, its disregard for the sort of traditional boundaries that had separate âhighâ and âlowâ art, all echo the themes found in Postmodern theoryâ (Davis 1979, p. 21). Davis sees a nostalgia boom as a result of a period of social upheaval and possible through technology. For example, with the advent of the internet second-hand clothes can now be accessed easily, from sellers anywhere in the world; in fact, such is the success of second-hand clothes on eBay and other auction sites that charity shops have suffered as a result. Expensive clothes were passed down through wealthy families, or, conversely, through poor families who could not afford to buy more (hand-me-downs). In the twentieth century, second-hand clothes became the preserve of the art student or the hippy, finding items from charity shops and markets. Angela McRobbie (1989, p. 42) describes how second-hand style in the 1980s was âmarked out by a knowingness, a ...