FinnFlair

Vintage, Retro or Something Else

I have a problem. Nowadays I get so frustrated when searching vintage items online because the word vintage seems to have lost its meaning. A quick tour around online auction sites such as eBay that even garments made by Hennes & Mauritz, Zara and Vero Moda are apparently vintage for some people.

The word vintage was originally used in the context wine-making. Then the word passed into general vocabulary to mean the year a particular item was made. For example, it was first used to describe vintage cars, meaning cars that were built between the start of 1919 and the end of 1930. Next, dealers of second hand clothing took this term a touch further and used it to describe older clothes.

More recently and particularly with the rise of internet trading, the market has become confused and damaged, sidelining true vintage clothing. People use too often the word vintage and there are some confusions. It seems to me that quite many people believe that everything that is not current season is named vintage. The misuse of the word vintage just gets under my skin and shows the seller really doesn’t understand the concept of vintage. What’s more annoying, the term vintage is sometimes used shamelessly to describe retro repro (retrospective reproductions) garments where certain sellers set out deliberately to deceive.

Call me a purist but in my opinion vintage clothing is anything from 1920 onward to 1960. Garments from 70’s and 80’s could be labelled as retro, and anything newer is just contemporary clothing. Although vintage hunting has recently become pretty toilsome, there are fortunately some tried and tested tips on how to find vintage clothing. Be back on Thursday to read more on this subject!

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