I’ve stumbled across a brilliant online resource – The Vintage Fashion Guild (the blog is on http://www.vintagefashionguild.blogspot.com/ ) – where lots of vintage traders sign up to discuss vintage clothing, to post links and contribute. It’s fairly US orientated, but there are apparently members in the UK as well.
The main thing I love is that the website has a label dictionary so that you can see whether a designer piece is authentic or not, and if it is, which era it is from. The “dictionary” is not in any way exhaustive, but it is the best one I’ve come across by far.
The other thing which makes me yearn to be part of this resource is finding out what kind of pricing strategies people have, if any. It’s impossible to find any decent books on the subject. The ones I have found are a good few years old and have terrible reviews (“doesn't offer much help” and “If you were looking into a particular brand or how to price a garment this really wouldn't help” – not glowing, are they?), which leads me to believe people just pluck numbers from mid-air and see if it works.
There must be a system of some kind. My Germanic brain demands it. EIN, ZWEI, wir must ein accurate price haben! DREI, FIER, das label must be correct!
More research has yielded the eVintage Resource Library (http://evintagesociety.com/vintageorbust/?page_id=56#fash), which has some great resources for dating and sizing things.
And that’s my capacity for today used up. I now know what a 1980s Dior label looks like in comparison to a 1960s one, but I also know that that tiny nugget of information will have replaced something else in my brain. I have only so much storage space, and now I can’t remember any basic arithmetics (I’m serious - I even had to look up the spelling on Wikipedia. This does not bode well).
Friday, 6 March 2009
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Chapter 3 (I think), in which a picture says more than 1000 words
Styling with vintage; a very lovely hat by Sara Norling and brooches by Zara Carpenter for Three Little Birds, photography by Sara Norling. More of these pretty pictures coming soon.
Monday, 23 February 2009
UPP magazine shoot
Styling with vintage for shoot for UPP magazine in 2008. Check it out on http://www.uppmagazine.com/
Friday, 20 February 2009
Chapter 2 (in which I ponder dead things)
I don’t wear much fur at the moment. This is not because I don’t love it (I do!) or because I’m warm enough (I’m not!), but rather because it’s February. I’m tired. SAD has set in. And I just can’t face bitching with people at the moment.
I know for a fact that some fur is bad. You shouldn’t buy fur from animals reared in horrible conditions purely for their skin. That’s not cool, you know that, I know that.
But buying vintage fur is fantastic – the quality of the fur is often amazing, and you know that the chances of the piece being the product of a large, polluting, sadistic industry lessen with age. Plus – throwing away or destroying something which an animal has lost its life for – that’s disrespectful in my book.
Sometimes the line does get blurred. I’ve recently (and accidentally) bought a hat made from what looks like oscelot fur. This is tricky, because it’s an endangered species, and was made so in the 1980s.
Look how pretty:
So… I can’t sell the hat unless I can satisfy myself that I know where and how it was produced, but I could wear it myself, because:
a) It’s totally pretty.
b) It died years ago. Isn’t it better that it warms my head than gets thrown away?
On a similar note, these A-team squirrels are absolutely fantastic.
http://thesquirrelshole.com/
I know for a fact that some fur is bad. You shouldn’t buy fur from animals reared in horrible conditions purely for their skin. That’s not cool, you know that, I know that.
But buying vintage fur is fantastic – the quality of the fur is often amazing, and you know that the chances of the piece being the product of a large, polluting, sadistic industry lessen with age. Plus – throwing away or destroying something which an animal has lost its life for – that’s disrespectful in my book.
Sometimes the line does get blurred. I’ve recently (and accidentally) bought a hat made from what looks like oscelot fur. This is tricky, because it’s an endangered species, and was made so in the 1980s.
Look how pretty:
So… I can’t sell the hat unless I can satisfy myself that I know where and how it was produced, but I could wear it myself, because:
a) It’s totally pretty.
b) It died years ago. Isn’t it better that it warms my head than gets thrown away?
On a similar note, these A-team squirrels are absolutely fantastic.
http://thesquirrelshole.com/
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Chapter 1 - part the second (where I forget about my troubles and think of the pretty clothes)
Shoot for eventual website with vintage goodies. Lovely Z looking like a movie star.
See this hat? Do you see? It has actual magical powers and makes anyone in its vincinity experience actual happiness!
It must be made from some extinct, madly extatic animal. I imagine some sort of joyous weasel with solid gold teeth, living off truffles and champagne.
I know I will probably have to sell this one day (what with the selling things and eventually making some money being the main idea behind setting up a shop), but before then I must devise a way of bottling whatever blissfull essence it exudes.
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