Adventures in the Rag Trade
Upstairs at Mr. Chow’s in Beverly Hills on a summer evening, the women picking at their pot stickers offer a lesson in understated dressing: a pale Armani pantsuit, a short, fitted Chanel dress, an unimpeachable black suit. Their escorts, including one of the city’s major art collectors, a movie producer and a British actor, appreciate how the women decorate the plain room. None more than the guest of honor, a woman possessed of style potent enough to bottle, who wears a sleeveless banana linen A-line dress by Christian Dior. The dress was made for a couture client in the 1960s. Yet she looks remarkably current. * This time of year, when stores are bursting with fall fashion’s harvest, some well-dressed women will not be paying attention to the latest arrivals from Los Angeles designers and their brethren in New York, Paris and Milan. This growing cult, while not renouncing all that is new and hip, is composed of dedicated preservationists. They are lovers of vintage fashion, and their world, once confined to ragged piles at flea markets and thrift shops, now extends to beautiful boutiques and coveted seats at auctions. * Los Angeles is prime country for vintage clothing. While certain communities have their dominant looks, from Pasadena’s persistent preppiness to the minimalism that has replaced Beverly Hills’ trademark glitz, rules of style are less rigid here than in many other places. A farm wife’s housedress from the ‘30s could rub hipbones with an avant-garde Japanese number on a crowded sidewalk anywhere in town, and no one would blink. It’s as if a local tolerance for fashion eclecticism spawns real-world versions of the standard tableau of a bustling studio back lot, where an Egyptian slave girl walks past a Union soldier in the shadow of a painted New York skyline.
When vintage pieces aren’t mixed with new clothes, the effect can be highly theatrical. Who would feel more comfortable in a costume than an actress? Julia Earp, manager of Repeat Performance, a vintage store in Hollywood that also rents clothes to studios, says she’s seen actresses take a little bit of their roles with them: “They enjoy wearing period clothing even when they’re not in front of the camera.”
Young actresses discovered vintage early. The styles were flattering and distinctive, the quality high and the prices low. Why spend $475 for a DKNY jacket when a wool crepe vintage jacket with hand-sewn silk lining could be found for $75?
Barbra Streisand was among the first stars to develop an interest in vintage clothing. Early in her career, she bought old dresses and gowns from New York thrift shops--she couldn’t afford new clothes with comparable impact. Long after she had the resources to buy any clothes she wanted, she continued to collect vintage with the same fervor she exercised in acquiring Tiffany lamps and Art Deco and Arts & Crafts furniture.
Costumers, of course, are always looking for ways to define a character. It has become a cliche of television wardrobing that wacky sitcom gals wear vintage clothes: old bowling shirts and circle skirts appliqued with poodles. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has sported jackets from the ‘30s and ‘40s as Elaine on “Seinfeld.” Candice Bergen’s clothes for “Murphy Brown” are spiced with vintage jewelry and accessories. On a summer afternoon, a team from Kirstie Alley’s new comedy, “Veronica’s Closet,” combed American Rag for colorful, unusual jackets for their star.
And those who once studied videos of designers’ runway shows, looking for gowns to wear for the big awards spectaculars, turned off the VCRs when they discovered that vintage gowns set them apart from the label-wearing pack. “Actresses want to attach their names to a dress, rather than have a designer attach his name to them,” says Rita Watnick, owner of Lily in Beverly Hills, the most elegant local vintage store. Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Tea Leoni and Cameron Diaz are often snapped in vintage finery.
Such is the power of celebrity that models and actresses have sanctified vintage dressing. Fashion magazines regularly report on the latest enthusiasms of top models, from aged sweatshirts worn as evening wraps to old Adidas workout pants. Let a picture of Naomi Campbell wearing a Pucci dress from the ‘60s run in Vogue, or Kate Moss in an antique bed jacket and a Prada skirt show up in People, and the stampede is on. “When I started in this business 18 years ago,” Watnick says, “it was for the few. Now, it’s for the many. It used to be uncommon for people to have a piece of collectible clothing. Now, the audience is much broader. My customers wear the best of the new and the old.”
The old is easier to find these days. Los Angeles is especially rich in vintage stores that serve different economic segments of the market. Then there are the thrift stores run by hundreds of charities from Goodwill to the Salvation Army. Some vintage pieces can be found among their mix of castoffs, but not all old stuff qualifies as vintage. Knowledgeable pickers will sift through the merchandise, looking for the older, better pieces to sell to vintage stores. At Out of the Closet, which benefits AIDS organizations, one can find many high-end donations, vintage and otherwise. In the past two years, the chain has opened six new stores, bringing the total to 10 citywide. Meanwhile, the number of vintage stores has swelled to two dozen. The rest of the country is onto the trend as well; the National Assn. of Resale and Thrift Shops has seen its membership increase 12% during the past year to 1,000.
Vintage stores should not be confused with designer resale shops, although there is occasionally some overlap. The resale business depends on people who clean out their closets and pass along clothes acquired in the last 10 years, to be sold on consignment. Vintage sellers would reject items from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that resale boutiques would stock.
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Once bold pathfinders, Americans today feel secure with the familiar, a premise illustrated by the identical strips of franchised-food outlets and chain stores in towns that once had a character of their own. The downside of commercial cloning is that a Starbucks and a Banana Republic on every corner offers few surprises. Vintage shoppers hunger for eccentric, idiosyncratic things that are singular in their beauty or strangeness. At one time, high prices guaranteed exclusivity. Today, not only is a $4,000 Chanel suit available to anyone with money, but since many people drift on a Nile of credit, anyone with a high enough limit on their plastic purchasing power can have one. Buying vintage has become one of the last ways to own something unique.
The logic of buying old clothing is almost Zen-like: If it is not in style at the moment, then it is never really out of style either. New clothes displayed in a store reflect the prevailing interpretation of a particular season’s look, and it’s the merchant’s job to make the message clear: short slit skirts, tight turtleneck sweaters, black and charcoal gray. The vintage shopper is an explorer without a map. She must rely on her own sense of aesthetics. What strikes her as beautiful, interesting, amusing, sexy, romantic? Each garment must be appreciated on its own, not as a reflection of a current fashion mood.
For the creative vintage shopper, new just won’t do. She yearns for something with history, with personality. When the severity of modern minimalism threatens to kill any sense of humor clothes might possess, a spirit from the past comes to the rescue. Liz Taylor in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”? The undeniable urge for a slip with a deep lace hem--not quite a pencil skirt but not really an A-line--surfaces. The silk should be fragile and slightly dissipated looking, the color of stale coffee. A pale cashmere cardigan over it. No embroidery on the shrunken sweater, but pearl buttons, for sure. In an organized life, clothes are an acceptable vice, a safe way to furnish a little drama.
Vintage clothes first became popular in the late ‘60s, albeit with a bohemian crowd that favored rich hippie get-ups. The prized decades then were the ‘20s, ‘30s, (think Zelda Fitzgerald in decline) and the ‘40s. Now the ‘60s and ‘70s are choice. The periodic recycling of eras makes vintage clothes like those Russian nesting dolls that echo each other in slightly different form; hidden inside a ‘70s jacket is the ghost of the ‘20s coat that inspired it. It sparks a ‘90s designer who’ll find her rendition on a heap of oldies circa 2022.
Where to hunt? At charitable outlets, thrift stores or at the Rose Bowl monthly flea market, where $3 is the average price of a blouse, it takes perseverance and a strong stomach to forage. A determined search might yield a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt from the era when the restaurant existed only in London, or a silk jersey Leonard dress, a French line considered the rich woman’s Pucci in the ‘70s.
The next level of vintage stores, scattered from the San Fernando Valley through Venice and Hollywood, primarily serves a young clientele. The language of adolescent rebellion is now spoken by high school girls who refuse to wear anything new.
On the funkier end, at Jet Rag, American Rag, Wasteland and Aardvark’s Odd Ark, racks of clothes are organized in a way that makes dominant themes understandable, so flowered rayon dresses from the ‘30s and ‘40s hang together, as do used jeans and body-hugging printed synthetic shirts from the ‘70s. Prices are low, and the clothes come with no guarantees. The possibility is great that you’ll find a moth hole in what at first glance looks like a great ‘40s Pendleton plaid shirt jacket, or discover a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress with a conspicuous stain. At smaller neighborhood vintage stores like Vintage, Vintage in Santa Monica, Decades on Melrose Avenue and Golyester on La Brea Avenue, clothes tend to be in better condition, and the prices rise accordingly.
Alexis Soloski, a senior at Yale from Pacific Palisades, explains her dedication to the cheaper vintage stores. “I’d love to wear Miu Miu, but on a student budget, I can’t. So I go to the Salvation Army and get an approximation of the look I like.”
At L.A.’s supermarkets of discarded clothes, customers are sometimes looking at merchandise that their favorite unaffordable designers have already examined. The world’s top fashion designers and their scouts regularly go on vintage safaris. Were they eager to name-drop, every secondhand seller could tell stories about the day Calvin Klein stopped by, the haul Ralph Lauren’s people left with, the shipment sent to Karl Lagerfeld, how polite Tom Ford of Gucci was or how Miuccia Prada almost slipped by unrecognized.
Designers say they look for anything they haven’t seen before--the cut of an armhole, a forgotten fabric, a combination of colors in an old print or a new way to cluster sequins on delicate georgette. “We’re not the first who have looked back,” designer Anna Sui says. “Christian Dior’s New Look in the ‘40s was a re-creation of the Belle Epoque; Napoleonic fashion recreated ancient Greece. Nobody’s inventing the wheel at this point.”
From Tom Ford’s bombastic mod collection for Gucci and Sui’s Bloomsbury-inspired ‘20s looks to John Galiliano’s romps through the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, designers brilliantly, and regularly, resurrect bygone eras.
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In the vintage stratosphere, where collectors breathe the thin air of prices most people would consider prohibitive, vanishing artifacts of fashion history have become collectibles. Before the sale of Princess Diana’s hand-me-downs at auction in June, the record for a designer dress from the second half of the 20th century was set by a Charles James gown that sold at a 1996 William Doyle Galleries auction for $49,450. The Doyle galleries pioneered selling vintage fashion at auction in New York; now Sotheby’s and Christie’s, known for dealing in fine art and antiques, are following suit.
Until recently, the auction-house approach has been to focus on women of style. Clothes are often acquired from estates, and, as in the case of the Diana sale, who owned the dresses is sometimes more significant than the clothes themselves. A Givenchy suit made for Audrey Hepburn is part of a scheduled October Sotheby’s couture sale, where bids are expected to begin at $2,000 for clothes that originally cost upward of $30,000. But as the market expands, even clothing without provenance is being recognized for its intrinsic and artistic value.
Fashion is often criticized for being too fleeting. But for collectors who perceive fashion as art, acquiring an early Jean-Paul Gaultier is as significant as owning one of Monet’s Giverny series or a bootleg Springsteen tape from the Jersey years. Each work of art illustrates the artist’s development and contributes to an understanding of his or her metier. If the creations of fashion’s greatest talents stand the test of time, hang in museums and appreciate in value, then they must be art, mustn’t they? The irony is that as fashion gains recognition as an investment, it is less vulnerable to the vagaries of, well, fashion.
Designer names carry weight in better vintage circles, a circumstance that’s complicated by the fact that for many years it was customary for women to remove the labels from fine clothes (to fool U.S. Customs, perhaps). Balenciaga, Hermes, Courreges and St. Laurent are hot, as are a host of great Americans, including Norman Norell, James Galanos, Rudi Gernreich, Geoffrey Beene and Halston. Auction houses acquire more masterpieces than they can put on the block, so they deal with special private clients as well. Rita Watnick of Lily bought 13 pieces that had belonged to Claudette Colbert; one black-lace gown from the ‘30s went to Winona Ryder.
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At every level, sooner or later the vintage shopper must grapple with the notion that antique clothes come pre-worn. “Ewwww, who knows where it’s been?” is a reaction typical of the uninitiated. But collectors still fall in love with garments that aren’t virginal. Gayle Hayman, the cosmetics entrepreneur and author of the style guide “How Do I Look?” has a personal shopper in Paris who finds vintage Dior, Cardin and Balmain for her. “Women go to Bloomingdale’s and try on a dress that a hundred other women might have tried on and think nothing of it,” she said. “The Hope Diamond’s been worn before.”
At the more expensive shops, the cost of laundering, hand-cleaning and repairing garments is included. At Lily, every garment is fit to the buyer’s body, then altered. It’s not unusual for a Size 14 to be cut down to the equivalent of a 4, as was the case with a lavender halter dress from the late ‘40s that Demi Moore wore to the 1992 Academy Awards. And not all vintage clothing has been worn. Garments turn up with their original price tags still attached. Dealers acquire “dead stock,” items that were never sold by a store or manufacturer, that were shipped to a warehouse and later unearthed, only to surface in the vintage market. A former Valentino saleswoman admits: “We used to have customers who ordered the entire collection every season. They couldn’t possibly have worn everything, even once.”
Getting vintage clothes to fit is more of a challenge than with new garments, because many vintage items don’t carry size labels or the old sizes don’t mean much in today’s terms. Considerable size inflation has occurred in the last 30 years, as manufacturers realized that women were flattered by being able to fit into something with a smaller number on the tag. An 8 from the ‘60s or ‘70s is the equivalent of a 6 or 4 today. You don’t have to be small and thin to wear vintage, but it helps.
Funny how the women who so cleverly pair ‘60s cocktail dresses and classic Hermes bags with their new Gucci platforms, or slip their Helmut Lang sweaters over silk shantung capris from the ‘50s, are often those who have time, style and the kind of jobs that allow them to troll through secondhand shops and call it research. Like a lot of shopping, finding superb vintage is a no-pain, no-gain activity. Anyone can go into a store and simply buy a new dress. But vintage! Ah, it promises rewards to adventurers with the drive of the hunter, the obsessiveness of the collector, the originality of the iconoclast and the soul of a dreamer.
