Now Vintage

[Fifty150]

2022 is around the corner.

The 1970's can now be considered vintage.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Retro = More than ten years old and less than twenty-five.

Vintage = More than twenty-five years old and less than a hundred.

Antique = More than a hundred years old.

 

[tonyb]

Perhaps definitions are changing (which happens), but I’ve long thought that “retro” means “imitative of an earlier period” but of more recent manufacture, whereas “vintage” means “of an earlier period but not yet antique.”

As often as not these days, I see the terms used interchangeably, so it would seem that my definitions aren’t universally accepted.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've seen the '70s marketed as "vintage" since the '90s, when the first wave of 70s nostalgia started to hit. Me, if it's something I use every day for its intended purpose I don't think of it as "vintage" or "antique" at all, no matter if its 75, 80, 90, or 100 years old. It's just "my stuff."

 

[tonyb]

My weakness is for useful (if only in its beauty) stuff from bygone eras that has survived into the present when so few of its type have.

I generally steer clear of retro (by my definition) and gravitate toward the real deal, scratches and dings and all. I can see why people baby items of high monetary value, but that’s not my stuff. My stuff gets used, and I have no objection to it showing signs of use.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep. And I have zero interest or concern about "preserving it for the future." The future's not going to care, and I'm not going to be here, so whatever.

 

[tonyb]

I like to think that some younger person(s) will find something worth preserving in the stuff I’ve acquired, but I also recognize that that’s another example of the human desire to cheat mortality.

Had predecessors not thought to save this stuff back when most of its type was being thrown away, it wouldn’t be here for me to use and enjoy having. But then, maybe they were just hoarders. God bless them, too, eh?

 

[Fifty150]

In 1975, Chuck Wepner fought Mohammed Ali. A movie based loosely around that fight was released in 1976. It launched the main stream career of a porn actor. The 9th installment of the film series is due for release in the year 2022.

With all the disco music, herpes, and bad hygiene...... the 70's might be a decade people are trying to forget, not trying to remember.

My lifelong dream to be a dancer was inspired by watching a man in a white suit, dancing on the silver screen. I never made it as a dancer. At least I wasn't inspired to drive a truck across the country, with a monkey as co-pilot.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Hmm. The seventies. The first of the decades without style. We’ve been having them ever since. Polyester. Angels Flights. Disco. It was my coming of age decade, but I can’t say I had any input. I did kinda like John Denver.

 

[tonyb]

I used to say that there were good and bad examples of the fashions of any period, with the possible exception of 1974. It was hard to find much good in anything dated 1974.

But I’ve since reconsidered. Popcorn ceilings and harvest gold kitchen appliances and Ford Pintos fit their era almost organically. Even rec rooms (remember those?) with shag carpeting and faux-wood wall paneling were touchstones of that time, and seeing images of such things reminds me that I am very much of that time, too. As were my parents and grandparents.

For quite a spell now mid-century styles in art and architecture and furniture have been hot — hotter in some ways than they were during that actual era. But the 2021 version of mid-century modern scarcely resembles what most of us who lived through that time knew. I ask anyone who doubts that to peruse the popular periodicals dating from then. You won’t see many stark white interiors and Barcelona chairs in the pages of House Beautiful or Architectural Digest with 1960s and ’70s dates on the covers.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I still retch when I think of the miserable excuses for tuxedos which we wore in the 70's, particularly at our friends' weddings. It's one of the reasons why, as I grew older, I insisted upon purchasing my own traditional black 100% wool tux for future special events. No formal wear rental guy was ever going to tell me, "Sorry, the light powder blue is all we have available."

Blame could be laid upon the groom or bride for choosing these atrocities, but friends really shouldn't allow friends to wear polyester or rayon.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I remember the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies as being, visually, a very dark time -- like a television set with the contrast turned up and the brightness turned down. Lots of dark brown paneled walls, the better to suit the phony Early American dark bronze hardware surmounted by spread eagles and the patriotic-themed drapes. Against these backdrops, the harvest gold and the avocado didn't look restful, they looked bilious. Looking over the Sears catalogs from that period at the far end of my shelf, it wasn't just my weak eyes that are responsible for this impression. Even the people had that combination of dark and bilious.

When I moved into my present house, it too was fitted out with that bleak, depressing early-70s paneling. It was on the burn pile before sundown.

"Every Which Way But Loose" brings up a vivid, vivid memory of the night I projected that film with a blinding, brain-ripping migraine. To this day whenever I see an orangutan I think of that night.

 

[tonyb]

I still retch when I think of the miserable excuses for tuxedos which we wore in the 70's, particularly at our friends' weddings. It's one of the reasons why, as I grew older, I insisted upon purchasing my own traditional black 100% wool tux for future special events. No formal wear rental guy was ever going to tell me, "Sorry, the light powder blue is all we have available."

Blame could be laid upon the groom or bride for choosing these atrocities, but friends really shouldn't allow friends to wear polyester or rayon.

Those tuxes are reminiscent of the ones we wore at my brother the disbarred shyster’s first wedding (he’s been married three times, and counting), in ’72, or maybe it was ’73, except ours had faux-fur lapels and stripes running down the legs. There is photographic evidence of this, which I hope never to see again.

 

[tonyb]

…
Lots of dark brown paneled walls, the better to suit the phony Early American dark bronze hardware surmounted by spread eagles and the patriotic-themed drapes. Against these backdrops, the harvest gold and the avocado didn't look restful, they looked bilious. Looking over the Sears catalogs from that period at the far end of my shelf, it wasn't just my weak eyes that are responsible for this impression. Even the people had that combination of dark and bilious.

When I moved into my present house, it too was fitted out with that bleak, depressing early-70s paneling. It was on the burn pile before sundown.
…

We had that cheesy “wood” paneling (I suppose that by strictest definition it was wood, but in the way particle board is wood and Velveeta is cheese) on one wall of our living room, and this truly cheap-ass coffee table and matching side tables with these stuck-on plastic panels that kinda looked like carved wood. Those plastic panels loosened with age such that when they got bumped by a vacuum cleaner they popped off.

On the other hand, I still have a much nicer, solid wood, two-tiered side table that was part of a set my Dear Old Ma later bought from a co-worker. It’s just a factory-made side table, but it’s plainly elegant and made to last indefinitely. No good reason why it shouldn’t be perfectly serviceable in another 50 years.

 

[Fifty150]

Fern bars. It made it okay, for people to specifically seek a casual encounter, on a Tuesday. No pretense. I want to get it on with a stranger, no strings attached. Now buy me a drink, and let's shag. Nobody had to beat around the bush, be ashamed, or try to hide that they were there to get lucky. It was the venue for getting lucky. Craig's List wasn't "a thing", yet.

.

 

[tonyb]

Careful, Joe Stud, that you don’t wear that thing down to a little nub.

 

[Fifty150]

Nobody needs a fern bar anymore. They hook up online.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I remember the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies as being, visually, a very dark time -- like a television set with the contrast turned up and the brightness turned down.

Wonder if that has to do with the fact that you were born in '63? I'm nine years your senior, and I remember the Fifties as fifty shades of dark grey. When you're a little kid you can't really see viewpoints beyond those of adults around you. The clouds parted after Kennedy was elected President, and as I have said before, my childhood innocence ended November 22, 1963.

That said, I remember the rest of the 1960's as the Best of Times and the Worst of times. I suppose that I developed a sense of nuance, particularly as to national and foreign affairs, during grade school. Thanks to Mad Magazine, I started reading daily newspapers, mainly to appreciate the satire in Mad. Mad passed the baton to the National Lampoon for me, and the Lampoon got me into early adulthood.

I sorely miss the Lampoon these days as a satirical counterpoint. I fondly recall that both the Left (The floating Volkswagen/ Ted Kennedy ad, "Sergeant Shriver's Bleeding Hearts Club Band") and the Right ("Dixie Nixon and the Boys in the Bund," "Son- O- God Comics"), as well as just about everyone else, got held up to occasional ridicule. That made real life a lot more bearable.

 

[LizzieMaine]

For me it was more like everything was, literally, badly lit -- like nobody used anything brighter than a 40 watt bulb. What wasn't brown was a kind of dark orangey-red leaning toward brown, like a tomato that's been left on the window sill to the point where it's starting to turn. I don't know if how our eyes perceive color changes as we grow older, but whenever I see a color combination like that today I immediately have a childhood flashback.

I started to become conscious of the world around the age of three or four -- I remember watching television at that age, and have very specific memories of things I saw, including Walter Cronkite introducing war clips, etc. I started reading the daily paper around the age of six, and got in trouble for saying out loud "hey, Tricky Dicky!" when my first grade teacher handed around the issue of "My Weekly Reader" with the newly inaugurated president on the cover. And even he had that overripe-tomato look about him.

 

[tonyb]

I gotta think that my ongoing fascination with commercial signage had its genesis c.1960, before I started formal schooling, but not much before. I recall realizing that those signs I gazed upon from the backseat of the family car meant something, something that could be said aloud, that they were LITERAL, and that cracking the code was absolutely necessary.

It was about that time that an older brother taught me the alphabet by using the spines of our set of World Book encyclopedias as a teaching tool. I was an eager student.