Defining Vintage

In a fashion hungry world full of mass production, counterfeit and just plain repetitiveness it is a must to be able to keep up, therefore vintage is increasingly becoming the most cherished and demanding pieces on the market. Resident fashionistas are in instant admiration when one boasts about they're jacket or handbag as vintage. It means these pieces have a past, a history and a story. Most vintage pieces are one of a kind and exude better quality than clothing that is constructed today. 

 Fashion is ever moving and seems to be moving even quicker. Which is why Vintage suggests a future. Fashion rotates itself every 20 and 40 years, collections on the Spring 09 runway were inspired by decades past. Designers turn to archives for inspiration, then reconstruct their interpretations to breathe new life into past styles. So it is with fashion and, of course, with handbags the rarer the better or the iconic the better. Chanel's 22.5 quilted bag, for example, was created in the 1950s and is still the Goddess of all bags.

"In Andrew Bolton's essay (Post)Modernity: Chanel and Lagerfeld, he points out that Karl Lagerfeld has the rare ability of being able to continually align "the spirit of Chanel" with the "spirit of the times" since his appointment as Creative Director in 1983. Former Gucci Creative Director Tom Ford also mined the styles of the 1970s and 80s to great success in the mid 1990s. Marc Jacobs is another master of vintage inspiration, Anna Sui is a retro maven, and just last season, Galliano at Dior paid homage to Christian Dior's New Look—a post-war revolution in fashion design that's never been repeated."  -bag,borrow,steal

Vintage offers an escape from the norm, instead of boutique shopping where carbon copies constantly prevail, fashion mavens are shopping at vintage boutiques for stimulus and motivation. Vintage also evokes a time where life was simpler, safer and perhaps more pleasurable.