The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends
In this age of upcycled, recycled, circular, slow fashion, there’s still one sustainable mode of shopping that feels like it’s stuck in the past: vintage.
It’s a pursuit that requires time, patience and a skilled eye, sometimes a sewing machine and often several fruitless hours spent scouring market stalls and car boot sales, musty thrift shops and murky back rooms. In short, it doesn’t fit neatly into the ethos of the busy working woman.
For many of us, it’s not that we don’t want that one-of-a-kind, little-bit-Gucci-meets-Little-Women floral prairie dress, we just don’t want to find it, fix it or smell like moth balls and second-hand cigarette smoke when wearing it. It would also be nice if that dream dress was the first thing you spotted hanging on a rail. Or better yet, your Instagram feed.
Well, this is 2020, and vintage shopping need no longer mean sifting through decades of dust and an avalanche of options. Instead, a new generation of vintage traders are offering hand-picked and hyper-curated collections in a bid to rebrand vintage fashion a more user-friendly experience.
Another Matinee is among the pioneers. Founded by 31-year-old Scottish north Londoner Sarah Brand last year, this digitally native offering spans one-off dresses from the Sixties and Seventies capable of converting even the most hardened high street shopper.
Sourced using Brand’s well-trained eye, Another Matinee’s clothes drop on-site in small, themed collections, each beautifully shot in locations across London including Rowans Tenpin Bowling. From psychedelic patchwork shift to a series of puff-sleeve, wallpaper-floral Laura Ashley finds, each item retails between £75 and £160 and features its own unique moniker, like the “I Have Three Or Four Really Great Folk Albums In Me” Dress. As each piece is unique, there’s no option to choose a different size or shade — once it’s gone, it’s gone.
But Brand’s customers — in her mind, “someone who would wear a ruffled, full-length prairie dress down the pub” — embrace this ephemerality with gusto. Currently almost two thirds of the dresses on the website are sold out. “Pieces are usually gone in about two to three weeks. The fastest sale was about 30 seconds,” she says, reminiscing about a parma-violet prairie dress with a ruffled neckline and ditsy floral print. “I’m sad I parted with that one.”
There’s no denying there’s an appetite for services that offer a gold mine of vintage gems on a platter. Even professional thrifters concede that the labour-intensive side of vintage fashion can often prove its downfall.
“People don’t have time or the inclination to hunt rare pieces out,” says Bay Garnett, the former Vogue stylist and founder of iconic Noughties magazine Cheap Date, who has built a career out of putting Oxfam finds at the forefront of glossy fashion editorial. “It’s hard to find an Ossie Clark dress in a charity shop. So if a seller has an edited collection of Seventies bohemian dresses, for example, they are going to get lots of customers. I think we will see much more of that happening.”
Certainly, brands which offer this service are multiplying at pace, each with their own USP. You’ll find no petticoats or prom dresses at Retold Vintage (@retold_vintage), for instance, thanks to London-based founder Clare Lewis’s love of a thoroughly modern and minimalist aesthetic. And They Wear, on the other hand, is home to an achingly cool archive of kidswear from cult OshKosh pinafores to tiny Calvin Klein jeans, sourced from LA to Antwerp by fashion buyer Lucy Mackay.
Meanwhile, Le Vintage Collective was launched by fashion PR Sophia Greene last year as a series of trunk shows with the aim of connecting Londoners to the best vintage dealers worldwide. “It’s been incredible to see the response to something I started as a hobby to share my vintage contacts with friends,” says Greene. “It’s been fascinating to see the demand for vintage when given to the customer in a beautiful, curated way.”
Alexa Chung and Adwoa Aboah were among those in the queue to get first dibs on treasures sourced by Miami-based dealer Eveliina Vintage. Future dates include an event with Levi’s next month, at which hundreds of pairs of jeans will be available to tailor on site, while Le Vintage Collective has plans to launch its own website later this year.
Where the luxury market is concerned, William Vintage is the reigning king. From Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic 1968 Safari suit to the white gown which closed Tom Ford’s final catwalk collection for Gucci, the brand beloved by celebrities including Amal Clooney and Rihanna has collaborated with Matchesfashion.com on a collection of one-of-a-kind haute couture restored to museum-quality condition.
Of course, with pieces starting at £875 and rising to an eye-watering £25,000, these are about as far from a bargain bin as you can get.
But whether you’re paying £80 for a sun dress or £8,000 for a piece of history, it’s proof that people are willing to pay to have their vintage sourced for them — whatever the budget.
