“During Covid, I was selling on Depop to make ends meet,” musician Jennifer Walton tells me over the phone, “and I was into the kind of classic archive stuff.” Recently, though, Walton started to feel like the archive fashion game no longer represented the community spirit it engendered just a few years ago. “It started to feel kind of bleak to me,” she explains. Earlier that week we’d met and got talking about how Walton had recently sold off her 90s Prada and Miu Miu pieces and was now instead dedicating her shopping budget to finding pieces of vintage US Army uniform – in other words, “true” vintage.
Over the past few years, interest in ‘archive’ fashion has risen exponentially. According to a report released by the clothing consignment company ThreadUp, the global resale market is currently worth $230 billion and is expected to continue growing. You can feel second-hand mania in real life, too. Not a week goes by without another archive fashion store being advertised to me on Instagram, and if you take a stroll through Shoreditch and Hoxton you’ll stumble across a fresh crop of bricks and mortar shops – both pop-ups and permanent stores – dedicated to flogging second-hand designer clothes.
For those who are new to the game, the term ‘archive fashion’ refers not to an actual archive where clothing is preserved, but a style of wearing, buying and reselling niche, often avant-garde, designer clothing from the 1980s onwards. Depop, with its platform offering a shopping experience like you’re taking a scroll through Instagram, changed the buying and selling game. Perusing shopping platforms like Vinted and the RealReal has become the favourite mindless pastime for fashion fans. Meanwhile, curated online stores have reimagined how we find and purchase second-hand clothes: places like The Grotesque Archive, who sell often obscure turn-of-the-millennium European and Japanese brands to It girls and e-girls, or IG-turned-webstore Constant Practice, which offers 1980s classics from labels such as Issey Miyake, Marithé et François Girbaud and Katharine Hamnett.
By 2022, what was once a niche interest for a certain sect of fashion heads had become pretty mainstream. Two years on, it feels like a malaise has set in. Trendy designers and seasons come and go in the flash of a TikTok and inflated prices are rife – on occasion, ‘archive’ pieces are even resold for far more than their original price. Even when I wrote about the new crop of expertly-curated, beautifully-presented archival stores for i-D in 2021, Josh Cook, who runs the bricks and mortar vintage shop Twos, was already starting to feel like the reselling game had “gone in a really cynical, banal direction – like ‘who’s going to find the next big thing.’” The next big thing, however, isn’t a specific designer, or an era, or a mood, but a whole new category of second-hand clothing: true vintage.
True vintage is the term that sellers use for clothing that is at least 50 years old – so, clothing that was made before or during the 1970s. In particular, vintage menswear has become a hot commodity. Cult fashion stores such as Zen Source Clothing in Tokyo now offer “distressed vintage” alongside designer garments old and new, and Constant Practice can often be found selling pieces of vintage military gear that align with the aesthetic of the garments they sell. Second-hand designer pieces might still reign supreme, but it seems the tides are changing.
“You can’t collect true vintage without an HTML forum, or befriending a buyer and asking them questions”
Jennifer Walton
Walton certainly thinks this kind of clothing is worth spending your hard earned cash on. Soon after selling all her old designer pieces in one go, she found a new clothing community – mid-century US Army uniform nerds. For the geeks who were into archive fashion for the fun of finding rare runway pieces, true vintage is like truffle hunting for garms on steroids. “It’s so ‘old internet,’” says Walton, “you can’t collect these things or find pieces you want without an HTML forum or befriending a buyer and asking them questions.”
I’m standing in the main hall of the Mildmay Club, a working men’s club in East London, where the who’s who of the UK vintage menswear scene have gathered to flog their wares at the fourth edition of the biannual Mr. Vintage Fayre. Two floors of prospective buyers of all genders, decked out in ventile smocks, aged leather, old Levi’s and a fair bit of Stone Island, are buzzing around rails and stalls full of garments dating from the 19th century to the 1990s. “These things have stories, you know,” Ned Prevezer, a well dressed 25-year-old Londoner and vintage menswear enthusiast tells me. “Even if you don’t know what the stories are, you can feel it.”
Rag Parade, a Sheffield-based shop run by the charming and buoyant salesman Jojo Elgarice, has a gaggle of youths rifling through their rails of sportswear, military gear and second-hand designer clobber. Blighty Militaria, a one stop shop for both the fashionable looking for that statement piece, as well as World War Two cosplayers, is a sea of umber, khaki and olive green. Upstairs, £800 sun-faded hoodies are on display at Sanforized’s stall. This sort of vintage isn’t exactly cheap, but judging by the well turned out crowd who braved the cold to visit on this particular Sunday morning, it’s popular.
“It’s cool to be wearing a piece of history,” says 24-year-old Joe Bourdier. Buying and wearing vintage designer clothing also connects you to a historical moment – perhaps an iconic collection or moment in fashion history – but vintage clothing goes one step further. It feels more like you’re connecting to an actual person from the past. I catch Surinder Duhra as he’s squeezing past me between stalls at the menswear fair clutching two olive bomber jackets, a couple of new additions to his 100-piece strong collection of militaria. “It’s like reaching back in time,” he says, “like I’m travelling somewhere.” He’s just purchased a jacket from 1965 whose original owner flew sixty missions in the US Air Force during the Vietnam War. I ask him if he finds that sinister. “There is a darkness to it, but there is also a beauty.”
Vintage collecting isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Since the 60s, second-hand clothing – particularly military surplus – has been the go-to for young people who want to push against the system. Army surplus, ripped jeans and worn out tees were once the uniform of countercultural rebels who definitely didn’t have enough cash to spend £800 on a sun faded jersey, but that doesn’t matter to those buying it now. This sort of vintage hunting is different, it’s all genders of Gen Z getting into the weirder, rarer side of clothes collecting and remixing their finds into a Fruits-esque bricolage of eras, with the stand out pieces almost always being, well, pretty old. In a nutshell, it’s becoming fashion.
“When I see an old military surplus garment I’m like, ‘cool,’” says Avery Trufelman, a journalist and podcaster who’s working on a new series looking at the enduring appeal of militaria. “It’s a perfect mixture of function and design.” The fact that we’re still wearing clothing from the 50s and 60s and it looks cool in a contemporary context is something she puts down to the amount of army surplus garments that hit the consumer market after the Second World War. For decades, it was the cheapest, easiest and most attractive option for style-conscious people with little access to funds. “It‘s sort of like ideal clothing,” she adds, “and it’s what so much mass produced menswear is based on.”
Derek Guy, a menswear critic known for his encyclopaedic knowledge of tailoring and scathing takedowns of badly-dressed politicians, agrees. “Many designers are usually just kind of riffing off of old vintage designs,” he says, “so getting the original vintage design is cooler: it says that I know about this and I was able to hunt it down.” It’s this nerdiness and reverence of ‘authenticity’ that initially attracted Walton to the community, and is touted by almost everyone I speak to about their love for really old clothes. There is a consensus that even though so many vintage garments are copied by contemporary designers, the aura of something that’s been worn time and again can never, really, be replicated. “Rather than the high fashion stuff, I’d rather go right to the source of it and get the stuff that’s inspiring it,” Bourdier says.
The true vintage trend isn’t simply confined to the shores of Britain, but is rather a transatlantic affair. Just a week after Mr. Vintage Fayre opened its doors another vintage market called Distressed Fest debuted in Los Angeles, the first clothing fair that focuses specifically on distressed vintage – the wear and tear you find on an old piece of clothing. (Think: the non-mass produced version of Balenciaga’s ‘Destroyed’ line).
Like moths to a flame, buyers and sellers of vintage Americana flocked to the hangar-like movie studio building in South Central LA to see some of the best the country has to offer. “There are so many unique pieces and so many stories to tell,” says 20-year-old Isaiah Kolar, a UC Santa Cruz student who sold at the fair of his love of true vintage. Kolar also sold at the Rose Bowl Flea Market the following day, another legendary spot to cop vintage finds.
For many at Distressed Fest, who lined up outside waiting to get in wearing their hole-strewn T-shirts and patched up Levi’s, the appeal of vintage clothing is clearly in its imperfections: all worn-down cuffs, sun-faded jersey and hand-darned knitwear. Francesca, 28, likens distressed clothing to “wearable art”. Connor Gressit, also 28 and one of the founders of Distressed Fest, agrees: “We love objects and art that tells a story, so why not apply that same logic to clothing?” The event sprawled over three large rooms, two for selling and one for displaying pieces so distressed they were held up as prime examples of wearable art. Although, in some cases, perhaps too worn to actually wear.
Credits
Text: Eilidh Duffy
Reporting: Jeremy Trimble