Is dressing vintage a purely modern day phenomenon?

[crwritt]

I was just thinking about this, moderators feel free to relocate my post if its already
been discussed.
I was wondering, if, in past times, there were many people who collected
and wore clothing from much earlier times. Not including religious groups,
have you seen pictures, say, of young people in the 20's, 30's or 40's who would have searched out and worn things from say the 1800's to 1900's?
I know there may be examples of old fashioned clothes worn for costume parties, etc., but have you seen anything that would suggest it was a popular
trend?

 

[Lauren]

I think about this a lot, too. And I wonder if I would have dressed in Victorian clothing in the 1930s, etc. Can you imagine what the charity shops had back then??
I'm sure there *were* small groups of people who took up aesthetic dress. I know the pre-raphaelites in the late 1800s and early 1900s wore clothing reminiscent of the Middle Ages and dandies like Oscar Wilde started wearing breeches similar to those worn in the era Jane Austen. But I don't believe that people dressing differently, as in a subculture, because accepted until relatively recently. If I'm not mistaken even the study of historic costume wasn't considered even academically or historically outside of theatricals until the mid 1900s.
When I was in Scotland and visited a castle there was a gorgeous painting of the lady of the house dressed in a fabulous 18th century gown. It was a very rainy day and I was one of the only patrons so got a one on one tour. The elderly lady giving the tour got great pleasure of pointing out that painting and asking me to guess the date. I think I guessed 1920s, but it was actually from the 1930s. The patron was shocked I guessed close to the right era! Apparently, the lady of the house LOVED the historical gowns that were still in the attic. They would have fancy dress balls and wear original 18th century clothing. Can you imagine? Now THAT'S something I'd like to go back in time for. Mostly modern conveniences but the option of wearing original historical gowns. It must have been divine.

 

[Amy Jeanne]

I've always wondered myself. I can only go by what those close to me have told me, though:

My dad, who was born in 1941, told me that when he was a young man in the 50s and 60s "old" things from the 20s and 30s were pretty much laughed at. To this day he still equates fingerwaved hair with "old ladies" lol Which is funny, because I equate fingerwaves with young 1930s women and 60s big hair with "old ladies" lol (when those same young 30s women were older!)

My mom, who was born in 1952, got rid of all my dad's mother's "junk" from the 20s and 30s in the 1970s after she died :rage:

My grandmother, who was born in 1929, can't tell me a THING about stuff from her "mother's time" (the 1910s and 1920s). She grew up in the 1940s and doesn't really like to talk about it a lot -- she prefers the here and now [huh]

Not saying it didn't exist, but there were probably not a lot of options to "look back" like we do today. We have the Internet and DVD now.

 

[Rosie_Beau]

I think I remember my sister saying something about the pre-raphaelite models in the victorian era would dress umm "vintage" and also dye their hair red. I could be wildly wrong though. My memory is hazey.

 

[crwritt]

My mom, who was born in 1952, got rid of all my dad's mother's "junk" from the 20s and 30s in the 1970s after she died :rage:


I was born in 1957 and would have given anything for "junk" from the 20's or 30's in the 1970's. Those were my high school years. My favorite dress, until
someone borrowed it and never returned it, was a maroon velvet one from the 30's my grandfather found in the trunk of a used car.

I hope your Mom donated that stuff to Goodwill and didn't just toss it in the trash.

 

[Puzzicato]

I suspect that very few pieces of clothing would have survived to become "vintage"! The fabric would have been worn to rags, even if you had a lot of money for clothes. In the Antonia Fraser biog of Marie Antoinette she talks about the queen's ladies in waiting and servants pretty much ripping her clothes off her back because "worn" stuff was one of their perks.

 

[crwritt]

I suspect that very few pieces of clothing would have survived to become "vintage"! The fabric would have been worn to rags, even if you had a lot of money for clothes. In the Antonia Fraser biog of Marie Antoinette she talks about the queen's ladies in waiting and servants pretty much ripping her clothes off her back because "worn" stuff was one of their perks.

You are probably correct. These days even our more expensive clothes are cheap and disposable compared to the cost and effort put in to clothing in times past. Think of the yards of fabric in some of those Victorian skirts.
People must have torn them apart and reworked them as they went out of style.

 

[Miss Sis]

Pre-Raphaelites dressed in their own interpretation of a 'Vintage' style, but they didn't wear actual vintage garments.

I've only heard of people wearing what we might term vintage or antique garments in the past as fancy dress. Lots of wealthy Victorians raided their family piles attics and actually altered original *Tudor* and later garments for fancy dress, to fit over the wasp waist corsets of their day, completely ruining them as historical garments.

And yes, re-working garments was standard. Spitalfield silks made in London in the 1700s were worth so much they were regularly remade and some garments now seen in museums are made in earlier silks, made perhaps 20 or 30 years previous.

 

[Puzzicato]

Or the occasional reference to a maiden aunt or something who wears the clothes that were fashionable when they were young.

 

[Drappa]

I've always wondered myself. I can only go by what those close to me have told me, though:

My dad, who was born in 1941, told me that when he was a young man in the 50s and 60s "old" things from the 20s and 30s were pretty much laughed at. To this day he still equates fingerwaved hair with "old ladies" lol Which is funny, because I equate fingerwaves with young 1930s women and 60s big hair with "old ladies" lol (when those same young 30s women were older!)

My mom, who was born in 1952, got rid of all my dad's mother's "junk" from the 20s and 30s in the 1970s after she died :rage:

My grandmother, who was born in 1929, can't tell me a THING about stuff from her "mother's time" (the 1910s and 1920s). She grew up in the 1940s and doesn't really like to talk about it a lot -- she prefers the here and now [huh]

Not saying it didn't exist, but there were probably not a lot of options to "look back" like we do today. We have the Internet and DVD now.

I think that actually isn't so different from my experiences in school in the 90s. I was really into the 60s and 70s then, and got laughed at quite a lot for wearing bell bottoms and hippie things, not just by the older generation, but especially by people my age. My parents and aunts and uncles always said they were so glad the ugly 70s are over and why would anyone want to wear that. Someone once stopped their car to tell me to get with the times and a few girls at my school were really nasty about some flared jeans I had, but then started wearing them themselves a few years later. It probably just depends what is considered trendy in the current environment and by the people around us, and possibly on the "cool era" being more than 20 years past so it doesn't remind one of one's parents' generation or regurgitates things we ahve already done ourselves?
Personally I don't understand why there is such a huge 80s revival and find everything about it completely horrid, but people younger than me seem to love it because they weren't born then, and people who were in their teens or twenties then seem to be more open to it than my generation because it makes them feel a bit sentimental about the time.

 

[kamikat]

It depends alot on what you mean by "past times". Fashion evolved much slower in centuries past. I did extensive research on 17th and 14th century clothing. It's not unusual for a woman to get a new wardrobe at her wedding and not get newer clothing until they fell apart, no matter how old it was. It was also not unusual for clothing to be remade, making new, more fashionable sleeves, changing the trimming, ect. As for the peasant class, they generally didn't follow fashion and were many, years or decades behind the upper classes.

 

[Puzzicato]

I've always wondered myself. I can only go by what those close to me have told me, though:

My dad, who was born in 1941, told me that when he was a young man in the 50s and 60s "old" things from the 20s and 30s were pretty much laughed at. To this day he still equates fingerwaved hair with "old ladies" lol Which is funny, because I equate fingerwaves with young 1930s women and 60s big hair with "old ladies" lol (when those same young 30s women were older!)

My mom, who was born in 1952, got rid of all my dad's mother's "junk" from the 20s and 30s in the 1970s after she died :rage:

My grandmother, who was born in 1929, can't tell me a THING about stuff from her "mother's time" (the 1910s and 1920s). She grew up in the 1940s and doesn't really like to talk about it a lot -- she prefers the here and now [huh]

Not saying it didn't exist, but there were probably not a lot of options to "look back" like we do today. We have the Internet and DVD now.

My mother in law (who is in her 70s) claims not to know where her mother was born or what her maiden name was. She is VERY much of the here and now!

How were fashions disseminated in the past? If you were a woman in the 1920s who was interested in history, how would you have gone about recreating the fashions of Jane Austen's time?

And tangentially, is that why the Greer Garson version of Pride and Prejudice gets the clothes so hopelessly wrong?

 

[LizzieMaine]

One thing to keep in mind is that in small towns and rural areas, people were a lot less conscious of contemporary fashion than they are now. In the twenties, you could go to a farm and find people dressed not too different from the way people dressed in the 1870s -- overalls, work shirts, straw hats, shapeless calico dresses.

The older you were, too, the more likely you were to stick to the styles you had worn when when you were younger: look at any photo of President Hoover, for example, and you'll see him wearing tall celluloid collars in the fashion of 1905, even though they'd been "out of style" for decades. My great grandfather was the same way -- he dressed like it was 1910 until he died in 1952, always with a high collar, a tie, a high-buttoned suit, and either a straw boater or a derby. And my great grandmother never seems, from the photos I've seen, to have worn anything but the same calico flowered dress. It must've worn like iron.

My grandmother's fashion clock stopped about 1945 -- until the day she died she wore her hair exactly the same way she'd worn it then, which was just slightly shorter than the way I wear mine.

Young people, however, didn't go in for wearing vintage clothes -- most likely because the older people were still wearing them!

 

[Grant Fan]

I don't know but I think that back then you wouldn't have wanted to dress vintage aka Victorian or early turn of the century. I mean think about it all those layers, and corsets, it would be no fun and in the 40s especially for the war effort it would have been nearly impossible to even get that much fabric with the rations. I don't now that's just what I think. But I can also distinctly remember that when I was younger like 10 years ago 1940s and 50s fashion originals were much much cheaper.

 

[Gingerella72]

I've always wondered myself. I can only go by what those close to me have told me, though:

My dad, who was born in 1941, told me that when he was a young man in the 50s and 60s "old" things from the 20s and 30s were pretty much laughed at. To this day he still equates fingerwaved hair with "old ladies" lol Which is funny, because I equate fingerwaves with young 1930s women and 60s big hair with "old ladies" lol (when those same young 30s women were older!)

My mom, who was born in 1952, got rid of all my dad's mother's "junk" from the 20s and 30s in the 1970s after she died :rage:

My grandmother, who was born in 1929, can't tell me a THING about stuff from her "mother's time" (the 1910s and 1920s). She grew up in the 1940s and doesn't really like to talk about it a lot -- she prefers the here and now [huh]

Not saying it didn't exist, but there were probably not a lot of options to "look back" like we do today. We have the Internet and DVD now.

My dad was born in 1931 and so was a young man in the late 40's/early 50's....he told me that he and his peers considered things from the 20's and 30's to be old fashioned and "square". No one wanted to be square, they wanted to be cool and hip!

I do think this phenomenon of dressing vintage is a modern one, and it's kind of a paradox: styles of dress have become so casual, so anything-goes, that people can look however they want without being ostracized (for the most part). That same acceptance of too-casual dressing is the same acceptance that allows us to dare wear styles of old.

Go back to the early part of the century where fashion and etiquette weren't as relaxed as now....if you were caught dead with last year's hemline or neckline it would be a much bigger deal than it is now. Even if it were an old dress being made over, you'd still keep reworking it as often as needed to keep up with the changing fashion trends. No one wanted to look old fashioned or out of date, or out of step with the social dictums of the day.

Has anyone seen even photos from the 40's of people wearing styles as recent as the 30's? (not counting elderly folk)

edited to add: I think the important difference to note is that today we deliberately choose to emulate a particular older era, whereas people then who continued to wear old fashions, as Lizzie pointed out, did so out of a non-interest in changing fashions or were just too frugal to. They probably weren't thinking "I'm wearing this because it looks sooo 1929!"

 

[kamikat]

How were fashions disseminated in the past? If you were a woman in the 1920s who was interested in history, how would you have gone about recreating the fashions of Jane Austen's time?

And tangentially, is that why the Greer Garson version of Pride and Prejudice gets the clothes so hopelessly wrong?

I've never seen the Greer Garson version, only because the pictures have scared me away. It's only in the last decade or so that movies have been accurate about period costuming, and even now they get it wrong sometimes. Many of the older movies were set in the past but used current fashion and hairstyles or the wrong period all together because it's what the audience wanted to see.

 

[Lauren]

Pre-Raphaelites dressed in their own interpretation of a 'Vintage' style, but they didn't wear actual vintage garments.

I've only heard of people wearing what we might term vintage or antique garments in the past as fancy dress. Lots of wealthy Victorians raided their family piles attics and actually altered original *Tudor* and later garments for fancy dress, to fit over the wasp waist corsets of their day, completely ruining them as historical garments.

And yes, re-working garments was standard. Spitalfield silks made in London in the 1700s were worth so much they were regularly remade and some garments now seen in museums are made in earlier silks, made perhaps 20 or 30 years previous.

Very true! And I forgot to mention that the Victorians had their "interpretations". They'd often make over lots of things (including old castles!) to meet their ideals. Funny folks, the Victorians

I've seen some dresses on Ebay like the ones you've mentioned. 18th century gowns that were obviously altered sometime in the early 20th century. And Victorian gowns that were made from all the yardage of 18th century ones- gorgeous brocades. It's quite fascinating. Now it's hard to look at as someone interested in historical dress, but really it's not that different than the "Make Do and Mend" outlook of the 1940s. I have a book somewhere with ideas of refashioning early 1920s clothing into 1940s clothing. I think the disposable clothing phenomenon is somewhat of a new idea.

 

[Miss Sis]

It's almost that clothes in previous times were not just made to *last*, but also to be made *over*. Most people could not afford to waste materials.

And Make Do and Mend was a skill people had way before WW2, it's just that's when it got that name. Especially in the Depression, some people had no income - they had to make do with what they had to hand - but also the Poor of previous times to that would work over clothing they could get hold of.

Interestingly, the Victorians as a whole very much looked back and idealised the past, whilst at the same time industrialising massively and embracing new technologies.

 

[Fleur De Guerre]

I recently read about an amazing artist called Gertrude Abercrombie - (1909-1977).

Here's some of her work (big, sorry):

1946

1954

As you can see, she was something of a goth, and in her biography here
, it says in 1944 she, "decorated the house in Victorian-era furniture upholstered in beige and purple fabric and painted the walls dark gray. " Also that in the 1940s and 1950s, her painting heyday, "An eccentric woman, Abercrombie drove a 1920's Rolls-Royces- she owned three during the course of her life- and sometimes dressed in dark clothes and pointed velvet hats which caused the neighborhood children to call her a “witch.”

So while not exactly recreating the past, there were people out there who loved the past and bucked the trend!

 

[HadleyH]

Isadora Duncan and her brother Raymond come to mind.

"... Her brother Raymond had already decided that all shoes were obnoxious and had begun making his own sandals. Isadora's dancing clothes were starting to influence her street clothes. Now they decided to adopt ancient Greek dress..."


Raymond with wife and son 1912... this is how he dressed everyday.