Vintage was not a word I connected with clothes in the ’80s, when I started wearing older pieces constantly—I think I thought of wine or cars as vintage, but not clothes. I had always dressed out of the dressing-up box as a child, pulling out my great-aunt Helen’s Poiret coat or her shredded opal Fortuny; I would dress my brothers up and make them hold couture poses while I finished the tableau myself. (My mother must have wanted these pieces to remain in our lives somehow, even if, in the ’60s and ’70s, she wasn’t going to wear them herself.) This didn’t last very long, though, and soon I had to content myself with drawing whole fashion magazines of shapes and stories.
But the glories of those dresses and capes and coats stayed with me like a language of feeling. I couldn’t afford fashion as a student at Oxford in the late ’70s, so my punkish trousers from the London label Boy ended up paired with an embroidered Chinese dressing gown from a thrift store. My greatest find at Oxford was a citrine, slippery bias-cut dress—probably 1930s—which I wore constantly against the grain of puff-ball mutton-sleeve taffeta, which was what everyone else wore to a ball.
The thrift stores of this time were, of course, Aladdin’s caves of jewel-level vintage, but at the time, nobody really wanted any of that. Somehow, though, the example of my courageous and beautiful great-aunt Helen—a whip-thin rebel and muse to artists, and a pioneering suffragette in World War I–era London (along with the Fortuny dress and Poiret coat, I also kept her taffeta frock coat and a marvelous striped velvet bias dress)—meant I wanted to dress like her too.
After Oxford, when I had the job of shopping bazaar editor (a very junior fashion editor) at Harpers Queen magazine, I discovered the Japanese designers spearheaded by Rei Kawakubo at Comme and Yohji Yamamoto, who were showing in London. Their investigation of the workings of couture via the frock coat, or a Charles James, completely enthralled me, and I scoured the Gallery of Antique Costume and Textile and auctions of theatrical costumes to find frock coats and waistcoats, and began wearing an Artful Dodger look, with a top hat or vintage tea dresses, to work every day.
For a shoot with Mario Testino, I desperately wanted the feeling of an 18th-century portrait, but I couldn’t find that ruffled shirt or waistcoat anywhere—until I discovered John Galliano’s 1984 graduate show for Central Saint Martins. That Les Incroyables collection not only inspired the shoot (with the incredible model Susie Bick): Having now met John and fallen in love with him, I found my fashion world.
It was through working with John that I began to understand the power of Vionnet’s bias cut: how it connects to your skin and holds it so sensuously; how you have to let a dress warm to you, to almost grow on you like a living sculpture. I learned so much from John—about the inner workings of a tailored hunting jacket, and how the quilting and seaming actually engineers form; or how different shoulder padding creates incredible volumes minutely. I also began looking for parallels to contemporary fashion in vintage pieces—the joy, for me, was wearing something 100 years old with something contemporary. It’s a pleasure that has never really left me—although, in 2025, it may be about pairing a pant from last year with, say, an Azzedine Alaïa jacket from 1986.
There were so many extraordinary vintage stores in the London of the ’80s and ’90s: Cornucopia, Antiquarius, Mairead Lewin, Lunn Antiques, and the Gallery of Antique Costume and Textile, where I found my 19th-century wedding dress of Spitalfields silk embroidered with wild flowers. By the time John moved to Paris in 1989, the flea markets were treasure troves of delicate turn-of-the-century voile blouses, 1910s slinky black skirts and long coats, and 1920s shimmering slips. I had a favorite dusted-gold Halston halter that I wore all the time, along with a striped, nearly nude mousseline jumpsuit.
By 1997 I had moved to Chanel, and even if the court of Karl Lagerfeld was uniformly dressed in acute tweed tailleurs, I continued to wear my long ’30s bias dresses, which I found in Wales. Diane Ashman, the owner of Ashmans Antiques and Old Lace, has been collecting clothes for her shop since 1975, and I would buy armfuls of 1930s slipper-satin wedding dresses, which I layered on top of one another, mixed with Comme or Junya and a great Manolo. New York, of course, was also a great city to find vintage. When I was invited by André Leon Talley to celebrate Easter at his church in Harlem, I found a pert violet Ungaro ruched dress, which I wore under a bright green shearling chubby with a tiny Philip Treacy veiled hat.
I think Karl loved the mix I brought into the studio. When I first started working for him, I really didn’t know what he wanted me to do, exactly—though he did say he didn’t want to be confronted with his recent past—and so I just continued what I had been doing with John by sending him things: a ribbon, a set of enamel buttons decorated with miniature arabesques of roses, my beloved wedding dress. I realized fairly swiftly, though, that ideas came from him, and his brilliant visual memory for fashion meant he didn’t need that kind of prompting. (Subliminally, though, I think he enjoyed seeing unexpected combinations.)
I have been inspired by each designer I have worked with—every one of them a tornado of ideas and references; a conductor of orchestral ateliers, attentive to every quiver of the hand in the studio. Each and every one also referred back to vintage as a kind of tuning fork of ideas: John was enthralled with the couture techniques of Vionnet and Charles James, with Savile Row tailoring, with 18th-century decadence spliced with London street culture.
Karl, meanwhile, was able to improvise with prodigious zeal on every rhythm and leitmotif he gleaned from analyzing Gabrielle Chanel’s collections, transforming them into a newness in time with the frontiers of change in fashion. Having absorbed every detail of couture workmanship at Balmain and Patou, having scoured the workings of a Cristóbal Balenciaga cape or gown—combined with his vast library of seemingly every fashion book, gazette, and magazine—he could parse a piece of contemporary fashion in a flash of lightning. After identifying an original vintage piece, Karl could note and date the incremental changes in such work over the decades with the same precision and authority that allowed him to tell you when Maria Callas sang which role, in which opera, and where.
Working at Fendi, I marveled at Silvia Venturini Fendi’s knowledge of the house’s archive, which stretched back 100 years, and her memories of her mother and aunts from when she was a child in the studio and at the shows, or even in advertising campaigns. Her living connection to the troves of vintage pieces housed in the Fendi archive at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome makes her reinterpretation of vintage both personal and vibrant. Kim Jones, of course, worked with vintage at Fendi in a totally new way, often focusing on a single earlier moment of the house—the year 2000, for example—and then collaging it with his vision, often drawn from eclectic vintage finds from Japan and LA. Tailoring techniques spliced into dresses and couture vintage dressmaking worked into tailoring: Kim’s knowledge of 20th-century fashion is formidable, but his eye for cutting technique has the abstract power of an artist.
More recently, in the leap to look unique—and amidst fashion’s ever-quickening dance to eclipse the last collection with the next—celebrities, stylists, and lovers of the couture skills of rarefied eras are scouring both websites and the secret stashes of collectors to secure something rare, beautiful, brave, and dazzlingly constructed. I have always believed that there is something timeless about haute couture—something which can withstand the frenzy of trend. The trick is to shift it with a differently proportioned shoe, or simply a great sweater. The best vintage, of course, needs nothing added, but to wear vintage couture for breakfast, you have to focus on ease of movement—grace is my definition of beauty. The red-carpet looks which astonished us at recent Met Galas were worn for dramatic effect, but, quietly, vintage is being worn all the time, everywhere: a vintage bias slip with a 1970s Elsa Peretti Tiffany cuff, or a ’90s Helmut Lang heel, or, from now, Maison Margiela tabis. And the reaction is always the same: “Where is that from?”
For this fashion story, I didn’t want to just shoot the iconic dresses we have been seeing on the red carpet—there is simply so much great vintage out there, just waiting to be worn and spun into new proportions by pairing them with different volumes and emphasizing different focal points. It feels like inviting our favorite dancers back to the party in ever-new combinations with myriad partners—or perhaps we are all about to be swung into Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights,” the piece that played at Alessandro Michele’s recent Valentino couture show, his paean to the river of fashion history.
Today’s fashion can sometimes feel overexposed: Fewer looks are being produced, and those that arrive simultaneously online, in editorials and advertising, and on the red carpet tend to garner more attention than anything else. The cleverness of Phoebe Philo is to launch her drops beyond the tsunami of the collections in powerful drip feeds, which allow you to feel its exclusiveness. Azzedine Alaïa, of course, always showed his collections out of time to preserve their rarity and focus—maybe we are gradually moving toward a different way of shopping.
Until fairly recently, truly great vintage belonged only to collectors and cultural institutions—but as their curatorial eyes reach forward as well as backward, both museums and collectors regularly buy recent pieces by designers whose vision and skill they respect. Quite often, within a year or two that piece becomes gold dust. That heartbreakingly urgent desire to find a certain piece by a certain designer—John Galliano, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, or Alexander McQueen, for instance—comes from the hard fact that these clothes will never be made again, or if they are, as many labels have begun remaking pieces from their archives, the magic is missing. The original holds something—in the rhythm of the stitching, the patina of the fabric—almost as if you can hear the designer’s voice within it.
In practical terms, of course, vintage pieces can never be as robust as something made recently. As the Costume Institute’s Andrew Bolton explained to me when he was working on the Charles James and, more recently, the “Sleeping Beauties” exhibitions at The Met, the “inherent vice” within the very fabrics of vintage pieces can devour them completely, leaving only a skeleton of silk shreds. By wearing vintage, our bodies destroy it—and not only by movement, but by the nature of our skin, with its oils and perfumes. To wear vintage, then, is to weigh up its life span, and to tend to it with a thought for its future.
More recently minted vintage, meanwhile, simply needs to be worn in a new way. I have collected Phoebe Philo’s Céline for some time, and it has been a continual revelation to witness how her pieces have such a powerful longevity—adding only a pair of leggings and my favorite Manolo heels makes a killer look for work. Everything you already own should go on being worn in new combinations, defeating the ancient in/out stratagem of fashion. You can play different music forever—even if the keys are the same.
In this story: hair, Eugene Souleiman; makeup, Ammy Drammeh; manicurist, Jenny Longworth; tailor, Della George. Produced by LG Studio. Set Design: Danny Hyland.