So many women admire vintage clothes but fear wearing them. Often because they don’t want to look old hat, eccentric, or just a little bit off trend. While perfectly happy snapping up a vintage-style dress that’s actually new, it is easy to feel tremulous at the prospect of wearing something very old and “owning it” as your look. This serves as a loss both to the budget of a fashion-hungry girl and to the environment. Because wearing vintage clothes not only makes you look more individual, it also gives you a “green” glow: I can think of no better way to recycle and also dress like a totally original minx. All this said, there are many ways to get vintage right. You can’t just throw on any old thing, and here’s the reason why.
Different eras had very different body shapes. And very different taste in bosoms. A 1930s’ dress called for a flattened bust-line worn very natural and loose within a silk slip. A 1950s’ dress required a high and pointed breast encased in a heavily stitched, often underwired, conical bra in the shape of a waffle cone. And a 1960s’ dress re-created a high, childish rounded line with the use of high darts and a heavily padded push-up bra. So, wearing a modern, bosomy, foamy bra from Victoria’s Secret with an art deco-era tea gown will look as if some cad has dropped two large oranges down your frock. You’ve just got to get the tits right, darling.
To wear clothing from other eras well, it pays to understand the erotic ideals of the time and the truth of your own body and proportions. Take the time to figure out which decade highlights your hottest assets.
Pear-shaped women look best in clothes from the mid forties, late sixties, and early seventies. Eras when A-line skirts, narrow waists, and tailored upper-body embellishments were at their prime.
If you have narrow hips and good legs, mod sixties’- and sleek thirties’-style dresses are your allies. If you are tall with broad shoulders, you are one of the lucky ladies who can rock an YSL safari suit or something from the androgynous seventies such as high-cut jeans and a cropped knit.
Pining after a look is useless if you can’t carry it off. I will never have miniskirt knees. That said, tailoring and adjusting a vintage piece to your body is wise.
Edwardian nightgowns can be cropped to make excellent blouses for a larger bust–thinner hip sort of figure. The same goes for bib-fronted men’s tuxedo shirts.
With maturity I’ve found that vintage dresses rarely suit me off the rack. So I cut them up freely, grafting on different sleeves, stripping off bows or ugly buttons, adding my own cuffs, or using the fabric for something else.
It’s too literal to expect a hem length or neckline to fit with current fashions just as it is a bit of a waste to use vintage fabrics to make exact reproductions of swing dresses or sixties’ cocktail dresses. Okay, if you are a swing dancer and want a total forties look, go there. But vintage materials can also be an invitation to reinterpret style. Mix it up. Be bold. Look hard at the way designers play with the contrast between fabric and cut. I love sewing 1940s’ appliqués (usually seen on evening dresses) onto American Apparel T-shirts. Risk is always cool.
Vintage (sewing) patterns can be more useful (and more economical) than vintage clothes. Collect the ones that suit your body and choose the fabrics yourself. I love to decade dance, making a seventies’ blouse in a forties’ fabric or a classic sixties’ suit in an edgy modern metallic bouclé.
Have a look at the big design houses such as Prada and Dolce & Gabbana. They do much the same thing: changing a neckline, cutting a sleeve a bit differently, creating new skins for the old ceremony.
Resist the urge to wear more than two items from one decade at once. You want to look like you stepped off a page of French Vogue not a stage set from Tennessee Williams.
Any old dress (especially a bias cut) always looks better with a mannish (silk backed) black waistcoat, or a big scary belt.
Mix the era of your accessories to deliberately clash with a dress. I like eighties’ belts on forties’ dresses, or thirties’ buttons on seventies’ dresses and starched lace collars worn as necklaces or in place of a scarf over a low-cut knit.
Deliberately mismatch your makeup with the dress you’ve chosen. Some seasons ago, Prada made fifties’ dresses look modern by giving the models wild seventies hair, pale Pre-Raphaelite eye makeup, and cherry-stained (but not heavily painted) lips. If you wear Marilyn makeup with a wiggle dress and high-heeled pumps, you’ll just look like a burlesque dancer on her day off. Vintage chic is never literal, otherwise it just becomes costume.
A sixties’ cashmere coat looks better without a fur collar. A fifties’ print dress with a bold floral is enough without flounces, lace trim, or bows. Sixties’ sweaters and blouses often feature big ugly buttons … switch them.
Don’t be frightened of a dress because it is originally couture or wrought from expensive fabric. Be bold and make it fit your body and your life.
The grace of old clothes came with the total look that women wore way back when. They had girdles and hair held firm with hairspray, ironed handkerchiefs, neat little heels, and powdered noses. So no wonder you feel like a rag weed in certain frocks. Without adopting the stuffy look of an Irving Penn model, why not add little touches of retro glamour?—a vivid lipstick, a kitten heel, a polished chignon, and the thinnest slick of liquid black eyeliner. Meowwww. That-a girl.
Older clothes are better made than most ready-to-wear now, so they must be hand washed and air dried to survive.
Even a classic cotton men’s shirt from midcentury must be treated like silk. Washing machines eat clothes of character.
In recent years, the trend in collecting vintage has focused heavily on big-name designers. Big money is invested in well-preserved pieces by Ceil Chapman, YSL, Halston, Biba, Ossie Clark, and even cult labels like Alley Cat by Betsey Johnson. But surely the point of vintage is to bypass snobbery and to find instead what really suits you. I have a Christian Dior dress that makes me look like a human brick, so I’m not wearing it … ever, and I have a Missoni scarf from the seventies I wear everyday. Choose your investment pieces in vintage as you would your modern things. Style trumps status every time.
Shopping for vintage cannot be dictated by price tag alone. Some things might be shockingly pricey. If a dress is old and costs a hundred dollars or more, it might be a rare fabric, in excellent condition, or simply in line with contemporary fashion. Bargain pieces usually take a lot more digging.
When a vintage store or website is a little more expensive, you are paying for the eye of the dealer and her or his edit (that is, good choices) as well as quality—a distinction that saves you a lot of time if you are searching for something specific or for a special occasion. Do not begrudge a vintage dealer a good price or attempt to haggle; they are not big retailers but usually passionate individuals with valuable knowledge of fashion history.
Shopping vintage involves trawling and a degree of risk. You have to imagine how something on eBay will fit, you can get “rack fatigue” when hunting through a hundred dreary fifties’ sundresses for one gem, and sometimes you lose your compass and wonder what is hip and what is simply old. But I love the creativity and invention that comes in hunting other eras for your clothes. Consider your edge: Vintage-clothed, you will walk into the room knowing you are wearing the only dress of its kind; that you are wearing something that is no longer made by virtue of the fact that clothing patterns have become so radically simplified and less fabric is used in modern mainstream clothing. So swish that bustle and strut that bust dart.
Details such as covered buttons, hand-embroidered collars, ribbon-lined seams, and silk-lined skirts offer a priceless, subtle elegance.
You will have a line and identity that transcends seasons. You will have escaped the global tyranny of wearing jeans with high heels on a Saturday night. And best of all—you are now a vintage vixen.
