Vintage Clothing

The fashion style is changing constantly which makes it quite difficult to invent new trends by the minute. Fashion trends come and go, mix and match in surprising ways for the delight of the fashion lovers. Without being too philosophically about the fast changing fashion world, fashion designers seek inspiration in past eras of fashion styles, based on rather practical reasons. The past styles are brought to present with a contemporary mark.

The vintage look in fashion style has been an already established source of inspiration for many designers. Taking a closer look into the etymology of the vintage word, “vint”-20 and “age”, we can easily understand what vintage means-the fashion style trend concordantly with the 1920’s era. Fashion style trending specialists go further and state that vintage style is referring to the period 1920-1960; anything after 1960’s period is considered more like retro. Let’s stop for a minute a clear the vintage vs retro dilemma. Retro stands for anything from past eras-actual items or upgraded styles. So we could conclude for the moment that retro includes vintage, in terms of the fashion trend inspirational era.

Vintage clothing and items are clothing and items for the actual 1920-1960 era, which leads to another clarification that needs to be well understood: commonly we refer to vintage clothing and fashion style with the implied meaning of vintage inspired style. There are not so many people that still wear clothing or other items dating from 1920’s. This principle would go for vintage jewelry and other accessories.

The modern understanding and promotion of vintage look is actually obtained through an assembly of key motifs. My personal number one choice of vintage motif is the lace. The lace material was widely used in the 1920-1960 era for tailoring all types of women's garments: dresses, blouse, skirt, hair and hand accessories, and bags, even insertions for coats, hats and shoes. The fashion designers of the era in-between, or after 1960 until contemporary years, considered lace a sign of opulence, which lead to almost discard it. The lace material owns a unique quality of exposing and covering at the same time. The sensuality of feminine forms is merely implied or suggested, just like in the 1920’s. The lace pieces that are considered vintage are those with baroque imprints, mainly roses, not so much the polka dots printed, as an example of an exception. The romantic and fragile lace seems to never get out of fashion. Some trends are tested repeatedly and re-invented each season to result in a more original, unique and embellished fashion style.

The hottest combination with lace is given by the velvet material. The velvet offers an aristocratic precious look for any type of outfit. The men inspired suits for women with long pants and blazers, if tailored of velvet and combined with transparent tops with lace are bound to remove the rough masculine impression and replace it with one of utterly feminine sensuality.

The vintage look stands not only in clothing with lace and/or velvet motifs, but goes further to the accessories, hair style, make up and even attitude. Vintage lace accessories, like brooches, clutches, small purses or hair bents or the summer gloves with lace and hats are coming back as a strong vintage motif to be matched even with office pieces or smart casual.