“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For clothes, going out of date used to be an irreversible process.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.
All our conceptions of classic modern clothing—our ideas of appropriate modern conventions, of the way dress may express ease and comfort, briskness and breeziness, glamour and sophistication, innocence and simplicity—were crystallized during the golden days of Hollywood. Following all the unsettling changes in established habits of dress and manner that came with the First World War, and after it, the movies were what gave us a solid and unified new standard of dressed looks and gestures for our time.
It didn t matter if shoulders were sloped or broad, if skirts were high or low, or if hats tilted at different angles as the years passed. The modes were all united by the magic of cinematography. It captured all styles of modern manufactured clothes in their most ideal moments—when they were worn by stars moving through a steadily glittering simulacrum of real life—and established the twentieth-century look once and for all. And so, in this century s second half, we uniquely possess, intact, our ideal visual past. We can still watch Gloria Swanson or Gloria De Haven, alive and vibrant as the camera first saw them, and just as crisply draped in their different modes—and we can love them equally.
Indeed, as it turns out, we can have our sartorial past back, too. Not only the camera images but the clothes themselves survive intact, because mass-produced clothes are made to be discarded, not remade or worn out. They have lasted, shelved in limbo like cans of film, waiting for these appreciative days to dawn. Now sought at last by a retrospective visual understanding, these clothes have emerged and flowered again in shops all over the country.
Today s love for old clothes is bound up with today s love for old movies. This current double passion itself is a sign not of morbid reaction and sick camp but of creative health in the allied arts of film and dress. Our new habit of paying close attention to the special qualities of old films and old garments amounts to a rise in the esthetic status of each. No longer perceived as facile, ephemeral, and silly, modern films and modern clothes are being encompassed by our expanding sense of what the possibilities are for modern art itself.
Neither the love of old movies nor the love of old clothes is now a private obsession on the part of a few; but both are common public and domestic pleasures. Movies no longer go out of date. The entire movie past is repeatedly being recaptured, reappreciated in all its fresh, old glory. It keeps teaching our eager eyes to caress and know and accept those shoulders— square or hunched—those pompadours, those draped and sequined crepe dresses with varying levels of hem, while their wearers go through their rituals of love and suffering and laughter and bring honest tears to our receptive eyes.
Just as new movies now refer to old film conventions, current fashion echoes the elements of earlier styles. This might look like the kind of return fashion so often makes; but the difference is that, like much current film, la mode rétro is self-conscious. It shows signs of being a deliberate reference to familiar themes, not an authentic rediscovery of basic material. In the recent mode, the elegance and conventional formality of dated clothes are subtly admired and mocked simultaneously: a critical distance from them is steadily maintained, both in the look of new fashions and in the creative resurrection of old clothes.
Most emphatically, it is not the spirit of campy nostalgia that is at work now. There is no frivolous sentimentality in the new direct use or the indirect adaptation of old clothes; just as there is none in the newly developed responsiveness to the conventions of old movies. Art has always referred to itself, demonstrating its awareness of its own traditions and internally acknowledging debts to its own past. Perhaps, in all these recent manifestations, we are at last seeing the art of dress, like that of film, catching up a bit with poetry and with painting.
Timeliest Vintage Clothes
Look for boutiques with a past—like Manhattan s Jezebel, at 265 Columbus Avenue. Owner Albert Wright specializes in forties dresses—silky, easy-to-wear. She s even got pill-box hats—with veils…Harriet Love, at 412 West Broadway, New York City, features men s and women s clothing from 1920 to 1950: everything from Hawaiian shirts to old lame handbags. It s all original, and in excellent repair…Find thirties and forties treasures at San Francisco s Old Gold, 2304 Market street. It looks like a giant period department store, complete with Big Band music…Pauli s Fantasy, at 400 Broadway, S.F., is where you can find (according to owner Pauli) "the peacocks of the antique clothing world." The garments are dressy, strictly feminine. With luck, you might even find a pair of Chinese opera pajamas…On May 10, at 8:00 p.m., ET, be at Christie s East (Christie s New York s newest branch at 219 East Sixty-seventh Street) for a rare auction of "Couturier Clothes of This Century: 1900 to 1960." Fortuny, Worth, Poiret, Balenciaga, Chanel are among the many designers represented. Some special offerings: Charles James s dresses from 1949 and 1950—never before exhibited publicly—and evening gowns designed by Cecil Beaton. "All our conceptions of classic modern clothing…were crystallized during the golden days of Hollywood"