How Would You Define Vintage?

So what exactly is the definition of vintage? We’ve been wondering ever since a buyer friend of ours tried to claim her H&M skirt was vintage cause she bought it two seasons ago. We found an answer to the question on Catwalk Creative, an online UK shopping site that specializes in goodies from a past era.

As a relatively new term, its meaning is open to much interpretation. Dealers haven’t officially established what defines and differentiates vintage from antique, recycled (secondhand) and retro. Consumers – and some dealers – use the word ‘vintage’ as a collective term that defines anything old. For clarification, purists would categorize ‘old clothes’ as the following:

• Antique clothing refers to any garments that pre-date 1920 (the nineteenth century; the Belle Epoque era).
• Vintage is anything that dates after 1920 and up to the mid 1980s.
• Retro mainly refers to Sixties’ and Seventies’ casual wear.
• Recycled (secondhand) is anything post early Eighties – not strictly ‘vintage’ clothing in the generic sense of the word.

If you can’t remember all of the above, remember only this: anything less than twenty to twenty-five years old is NOT ‘vintage’.

So rocking a pair of bleached overalls you found at Goodwill that look like they fell of the set of Saved by the Bell doesn’t make you a vintage queen. Keep that in mind indies as style quickly falls into 90’s.  You’re not rocking vintage, you’re rocking recycled.