VINTAGE OR RETRO?

Vintage is back? What does that even mean? If “vintage is back” then surely it means that it was once gone, but it was never really gone, just on sabbatical, because as fashion is renowned for, it is recycles, resurrects and re-formulates, therefore, is what we call vintage, even vintage at all?

Take for example the pin up style of Betty Page and see how it correlates to the immaculate and very current Dita Von Teese, also in the 70s the young hipsters and groovers like Levi and the Rockats were styling themselves on the teddy boys and rockabillies of the 40s and 50s. Maybe it was okay to call it vintage back in the 70s when Levi and the Rockats were doing it, but how many times can a style or trend be revisited and still be called vintage?

(Andy Warhol T.V with Debbie Harry)

All the indie kids now are pulling back threads that were definitive of the mod generation in the 60s. But is it actually vintage or is it retro?

(The Vintage Look)

What frustrates me about today’s Vintage Look is that the fickle followers of fashion trends don’t even know what vintage they are wearing, or wear something that “looks” vintage but isn’t vintage at all, rather it is a 

Topshop vintage inspired piece and still they have the audacity to call it vintage.

Usually music or social politics inspire fashion trends, mods, rockers, punks, metalheads, power dressers, anti-fashion stylistas, so what does our current magpie approach to borrowing from all of these past styles and trends say about us and our contemporary society?

As we can see with indie music, a certain mod-style is called back onto the highstreet, so what we have now is a retro revival, not a vintage vivification. There is a fine line between what is vintage and what is retro. Vintage is a one-off piece of great quality and value from a particular epoch in fashion history. That which is retro, is in fact what most of us who trawl through the markets of Brick Lane and Soho are wearing, cheaper, more affordable pieces that are retrospective reminders of past trends, which probably were mass-produced,

as mass-production of fashion trends have occurred since the mid-20th century.

So why do we, as young trend setters and followers seek to rejuvenate that against which our forebears once rebelled, in fact, against which the fashion industry itself rebelled? What is the constant obsession with the past and how does re-visiting it inspire future trends? And why now more than ever before are we so nostalgic for the fashions of previous eras? I leave these questions open to you and please feel free to respond with whatever is on your mind.