Monthly Archives: October 2018

We will always see the past through the lens of our own aesthetic; just look at the prevalence of facial hair in historical dramas these days.

I have a number of issues with reproduction but the main one is that most of it is a pale inauthentic smudgy imitation of the real thing. We will always choose pieces from the past that most appeal to our modern taste: the past is not a bad taste, frump free zone. A bit of proper research is not very difficult and it is possible to choose and recreate pieces that are true to a period and that appeal to a modern audience (Peaky Blinders I’m looking at you). Production inaccuracies like invisible zips in 1940s dress also irritate me to an irrational degree, but maybe that’s just me being a pedantic kill joy: what does it matter if people love them? As I say to my clients, nobody actually wants to look like their grandmother, but they do want an essence of it.

Bespoke Edwardian lace with square neck

As someone who has been doing some reproduction of late this is an important question, if a piece is accurate down to the last stitch is that enough? After all most of my brides aren’t a size 8… However that garment, regardless of how pretty, made of authentic vintage fabric and an original patterns didn’t see the blitz. Original dresses are accidental time machines, the tiny stitches of a long dead seamstress, confetti captured in a hem, even a wedding cake crumb capture a moment in time that a reproduction cannot even aspire to. The trick is to distill the past without destroying its essence, be faithful to the essence and just a little bit of a pedant.

Many of my clients like the green credentials of vintage clothing, the lower carbon footprint and not adding to one of the most polluting industries on the planet: It takes a mind boglingly huge volume of water to make just one t-shirt.

Our modern world is swamped in cheaply produced clothing. In my opinion you should not be able to buy a top for £4. Neither should top flight designers damage old stock so they can’t be resold. Not that sweat shops are anything new, they’ve just moved from the Jewish East End of London to India. In the past people had fewer clothes and knew how to care for them, they had what we would now call capsule wardrobes. Only really rich people had a large choice of clothes to wear There has been a democratisation of fashion but the instagrammers who can only wear something once have gone too far.

Quirky originals; cut and construction.

My husband loves vintage clothing as well but has no interest in what era they come from, he just thinks they are more interesting and better made then modern clothes. He still runs in horrid modern running kit though, cotton chafes the nipples, and plimsolls are just no good. I notice that a lot of my clients also really like tattoos, is it that vintage and ink are about a form of radical self expression? For me as a super self conscious teen I loved the way 1940s dresses were both modest and sexy. I wore mine chopped short with DM boots. I felt comfortable and right in those dresses in a way I never really did in modern late 1980s clothes.

1940s Rayon satin with love knots

Mr. AVB on the right, image by Scott Choucino www.scottchoucino.com

Nostalgia/born in the wrong era. 1 of 4

1940s moire striped Rayon

Anyone who says the study of the history of fashion is irrelevant because it’s just frippery girl stuff is missing the point. The clothes we wear reflect who we think we are, so what does that say about those of us who love and wear vintage?

A love of vintage fashion and a passion for history grew up in tandem for me, it wasn’t enough that I liked the frocks, I wanted to understand why they were like that, how they fit into the social fabric of time.

I’m not one of those people how goes to re-enactment weekends or dresses in vintage all the time, I don’t feel I was born in the wrong decade, I like antibiotics and indoor plumbing. Re-enactors often seem to choose times of war, although WWII seems to be more popular than WWI. Is it the attraction the poignancy and urgency of those times? I’m guessing no one actually wants a full on blitz experience, but to go to a swing dance is rather fun. The fantasy of the past as conjured by the fully-fledged reenactors is just that, nostalgia. The reality is that for almost any time in the past women couldn’t easily be professionals, it was illegal to be gay and if you were black you were staff. All very odd, but I do get it too.

My love of the past stems from the films of the time; my heroines as a teenager were Mynra Loy, Ginger Rogers and Kathrine Hepburn. Not to mention any films by Powell and Pressburger. None of that was a real depiction of the time either, none of my favourite films were documentaries, but I was also obsessed with the history too.