“Boom…In Vintage Clothes,” by Anne Hollander, was originally published in the April 1979 issue of Vogue.
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The Old Clothes Mode is entirely twentieth century. One hundred years ago nobody with any flair for style—Daisy Miller or Anna Karenina, say—could possibly feel elegant in an 1839 pelisse, whatever its state of preservation or original chic.
For clothes, going out of date used to be an irreversible process. The clothes Mother wore became increasingly ridiculous until, eventually, they might achieve a nice condition called “quaintness.” You could look fine if you were quaintly dressed—but only if you were on the stage, or at a costume party, or if you were a comic, elderly, or royal personage, or a child. But “quaintness” is now obsolete. Instead, we have la mode rétro, expressed not only by deft reproductions of lately outmoded fashions but by a passion for the old stuff itself. Why do we have this passion, and where did we get it?
Some of it came from the Great ‘Sixties Costume Party. Included then among possible getups, along with leather and metal and ethnic garb, were clothes that looked as if they had been long imprisoned in the attic, or maybe in the grave. Shops flourished by purveying all sorts of musty remnants; and a pelisse from 1839 might at that time have gone over with dashing success— if only it were dilapidated enough. Today, what remains from the frantic ‘sixties is a youthful vogue for tired old lace and muslin underwear, which are now worn on the outside for romantically sordid effects—suggesting Bellocq and Brooke Shields.
Collecting ancient garments is nothing new among antique-clothes fanciers; but in fact “antique” is all you can call these garments, since you don’t see anyone at the theater in an old 1839 pelisse right now, any more than you did in 1879. A precise degree of outdatedness is currently desirable—within strict temporal limits: you don’t see miniskirts at the theater, either, or stiff bell-shaped skirts bursting out below tightly boned bodices.
At the moment, to qualify as being acutely wearable, old clothes must date roughly from the years 1920-1950—a significant era in the history of national taste. During that epoch, the two most important influences on the look of modern dress took firm hold of America: mass production and the movies. These combined to create out of the clothed figure a sleek, compact object, enduringly captured on film in a sleek, animated camera image. Our taste in personal looks has been founded on it ever since.
