see why vintage clothing holds special value: there are stories embedded in the seams, memories stuffed into the lining, caught between the pleats, and hidden in the hems. Sometimes the previous owner has left evidence
A shopping list in the pocket, a coffee stain or a rip from an ecstatic night out dancing. An imperfection is an indelible detail of a second-hand garment’s charm. A tear or missing button might tell the story of the item’s provenance, and sometimes an imperfection explains how the item found its way to you, who will mend it and love it again.
For thousands of years, people wore one another’s hand-me-downs, and bought and sold clothing second-hand because it was so costly to purchase things new. If one were to take for an example My grandmother sewed the dresses my mother wore to school, and then my aunt wore them and then they were passed down to a cousin. But at some point, this hand-me-down tradition stopped being so common. Buying new outfits was a way to present as having self-respect; the only people who wore vintage clothing were either poor or weird or both.
But then countercultures struck chords in fashion: the Diggers in the 1960s in San Francisco put together spectacular outfits out of discarded and donated clothing as part of their radical anti-capitalistic lifestyle. Then London’s punks transgressed even further, mixing clothing from all eras into a new aesthetic meant to make a person look like they just survived a trip to hell and back. The new look leaked into mainstream culture through television and movies. After that, goth and grunge invaded the Nineties. in 1993, Kurt Cobain sings live on television in a ragged green sweater, and the world changed forever. Cobain represented anti-conformity, strength in honest vulnerability, and beauty that could be ravaged by its own rage and passion and still be beautiful.
