Oct 20, 2022·edited Oct 21, 2022Liked by Amy Odell
That's the thing with vintage - it's a moving goalpost. Also all the discourse about vintage and secondhand shopping in fashion media (EDIT: barring Liana Satenstein at Vogue, afaik the only mainstream media fashion writer who seems to acknowledge old mall brands in the secondhand shopping context) tends to forget that once-cheap clothes can be wearable and good-quality vintage too, it isn't all one of a kind unique silk tea dresses and/or 1970s Halston/80s Bill Blass/Lacroix/Yohji, it will someday also end up being those Gap stripey jumpers (already is) and that Topshop skirt that every girl wanted in the summer of 2008. Just as it is for, say, vintage 501s and 60s high street brand Biba - that stuff wasn't meant to be expensive when it was first sold, but it is now.
(I hope the youths haven't started calling the American Apparel look 'y2k' though - it was 00s, but later 00s, and that whole hipster look that's now been renamed indie sleaze, arose and got popular at least in part as a direct backlash against late 90s-early 00s styles. Calling the resulting mid-late 00s retro-influenced looks 'y2k' would be like calling a punk a hippie.)
And I'm shopping my own closet for vintage these days. I lost a lot of weight and can fit into things I've had for years. But Y2K? The year I graduated from seminary? Where I wrote a fashion column for the school underground newspaper? naaaah.
"Many of us probably want to wear a bucket hat and low-rise jeans as much as we want to ingest sawdust."
I feel so heard and seen! I'm just glad I'm not alone!
That's the thing with vintage - it's a moving goalpost. Also all the discourse about vintage and secondhand shopping in fashion media (EDIT: barring Liana Satenstein at Vogue, afaik the only mainstream media fashion writer who seems to acknowledge old mall brands in the secondhand shopping context) tends to forget that once-cheap clothes can be wearable and good-quality vintage too, it isn't all one of a kind unique silk tea dresses and/or 1970s Halston/80s Bill Blass/Lacroix/Yohji, it will someday also end up being those Gap stripey jumpers (already is) and that Topshop skirt that every girl wanted in the summer of 2008. Just as it is for, say, vintage 501s and 60s high street brand Biba - that stuff wasn't meant to be expensive when it was first sold, but it is now.
(I hope the youths haven't started calling the American Apparel look 'y2k' though - it was 00s, but later 00s, and that whole hipster look that's now been renamed indie sleaze, arose and got popular at least in part as a direct backlash against late 90s-early 00s styles. Calling the resulting mid-late 00s retro-influenced looks 'y2k' would be like calling a punk a hippie.)
And I'm shopping my own closet for vintage these days. I lost a lot of weight and can fit into things I've had for years. But Y2K? The year I graduated from seminary? Where I wrote a fashion column for the school underground newspaper? naaaah.