What is vintage and how is it doing in Russia
Vintage - so fashionable word that it is used to describe any thing older than five years. But where does this phenomenon come from and why is it needed, except perhaps the vintage dealers and its avid collectors. For Wonderzine, journalist Elena Stafyeva tells what real vintage clothing is, what pricing in this segment is like pricing in the art market and how things are with vintage Russia.
The first thing that people always encounter, only approaching vintage, especially in Russia, is a sacramental question: what, in fact, does vintage differ from second-hand? From a technical point of view, in principle, nothing: these are old clothes that are often (but, by the way, not always) worn. Conceptually, vintage differs from second-hand fundamentally - and above all in the fact that it is old clothing that has passed a filter system, that is, it is specially found, selected and built into a certain fashionable context. That is, as an old newspaper ceases to be rubbish, being placed in the installation of Ilya Kabakov, for example, so the old dress ceases to be second-hand, being found and chosen by a vintage dealer and placed in its boutique. This is exactly how vintage dealers work: they sift through what is collected for nameless charity shops and second-hand warehouses, find there standing things, put them in order and exhibit them in their own vintage stores.
Actually, this is how vintage appeared in the mid-90s - when people like Anna Steinberg and Tracy Tolkien in London, Didier Ludo in Paris, Franco Jakassi in Milan began to find, select and display things in their stores from previous decades. And they began to go to them, John Galliano, Nicolas Hescieres and Frida Giannini in search of something interesting, characteristic, original and just somehow evoking the work of their creative thought. And so it turned out that it was the 90s that were the last original fashion decade: then, for 20 years now, we are dealing exclusively with the triumph of vintage, when fashion is engaged in picking decade after decade. What is it that influenced - vintage fascination with fashion or fashion-postmodernism at vintage fascination is hard to say, but the connection between one and the other is quite obvious. And today, the 90s themselves have just become the upper limit of vintage: things must be at least 20 years old so that it becomes a vintage.
Hermes Kelly Bag
Chanel vintage clips
Of course, a vintage thing must have certain qualities: not just be beautiful, but still be very characteristic of the style of one or another decade of the 20th century and somehow correspond with the brightest ideas of its time. And of course, well done. That is, if in the wardrobe of your mother or grandmother, Yves Saint Laurent's jacket of the 70s was lying around, and a couture dress sewn in his workshops (even if your grandmother was friends with her, for example, Yves Saint Laurent), then it will definitely be vintage. The second option - if you have a grandmother's dress, stitched by the best Moscow or St. Petersburg dressmaker (Voronezh, Odessa, Rostov, etc.), with satin stitchwork, rychelle, hand-made festoons and tucks, is also a vintage. But the beautiful dress of no name, brought from some fraternal socialist republic or from the construction of communism like Cuba or Iran, is still not entirely vintage. Although the border is quite blurred here: for example, the famous Parisian store Garisol - a huge hangar, mostly filled with second-hand (because everything that draws on vintage, was chosen by vintage dealers even at the stage of unloading and packing) - it has a reputation as a vintage place, where goes all the Parisian fashionable youth. By the way, it was from the idea to dress up effectively, fashionably and at the same time for the penny, the popularity of vintage began. When Galliano, while studying at St. Martins, came to the Steinberg & Tolkien store or to Portobello, he was looking for just that - the possibility of satisfying his extravagant taste, keeping within the meager student money. Vintage was not only an expression of advanced taste, but also anti-bourgeois pathos. Then, of course, the stars came: Julia Roberts in a vintage black Valentino dress at the Oscars, Kate Moss in a white dress-column Madame Grès at the Cannes Film Festival - and the vintage began to quickly become more popular and just go up.
We have, for obvious reasons, no, and in the next 30 years at least there will not be our own vintage
Book of Tracy Tolkien Dressing Up Vintage
As for the price, then Tracy Tolkien in her famous book Dressing Up Vintage formulated: if you buy a vintage item, then over time its price will only rise, if you buy a designer item from the latest collection, then in a year you will get well if 10 percent of its original price. Today, the vintage market is similar to the art market: the prices of the last five to seven years have been growing rapidly, especially for serious haute couture and, in general, everything related to large luxury houses. Already, every Russian it-girl realized that saying "and this is my vintage Kelly" is much better than just "and this is my new Birkin". Today in the world capitals - Paris, London, New York - to vintage shops, especially promoted, almost did not approach. And if you want to find something with the label Dior, Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche within 100-200 euros, then you need to look for it in the provincial stores and in the provincial flea markets. In this case we are talking about pret-a-porter, although suddenly a couture might get caught up - miracles happen. This trend is not the most fun, but it helps to preserve the crazy excitement of the vintage hunt: to buy a Chanel dress for a couple of thousand euros in the Didier Ludo boutique in the Palais Royal, you do not need any intelligence or luck, but to find the same on marche aux puces anywhere in Lyon is a real dose of adrenaline, endorphins and so on.
In Russia, unfortunately, all these joys are inaccessible: for obvious reasons, we don’t have and will not have our vintage for at least 30 years, and therefore our vintage environment is very distilled and, of course, not as democratic as in Europe and America. Russian vintage is a very glamorous vintage, and prices for it here will always be appropriate, for which there are completely objective reasons. Perhaps the situation will sometime change - at least judging by the number of vintage projects that have opened in the last couple of years - but, as the classic said, "it’s a pity that I don’t have to live in this beautiful time - neither me nor you" .