HOW TO LOOK MODERN IN VINTAGE
"I don't want to look retro. I think permed hair looks ridiculous and I would not be seen dead in anything with real fur. Right now I want a cardigan that I can tuck into a midi skirt, but I want it simple, with neutral colours like the ones on the catwalk, and not in some light, pastel colour with embroidered flowers." This is the thinking of many young people today, who increasingly go second-hand shopping, but for this season's looks. Can we find "now" clothes, without buying new clothes?
Buying clothes second-hand is, after all, very fashionable. This is sustainable retail therapy, a feelgood fashion fix that doesn't add to the environmental problem of clothing overproduction. In the U.S., the resale market has grown 21 times faster than the retail market in the past three years, with a report this year predicting that the second-hand market could overtake fast fashion within a decade. In the U.K., the younger shoppers are returning to a taste for second-hand things that their parents' generation, raised on fast fashion chains like Zara, Primark and H&M, never cultivated. Eighty per cent of 16-21-year-olds are happy to buy second-hand clothes and an amazing 90% of over-60s are comfortable buying used garments, while less than a third of shoppers in their 30s and 40s are happy to buy used clothes, according to a survey by a waste management agency.
The new trendy profile of second-hand shopping is beginning to be felt on the high street. In Covent Garden in London, a new branch of Picknweight, a vintage store that is already a cult destination in Berlin, had customers queueing down the street when it opened. Many people start their hunt for now-clothes-not-new-clothes next door, in the Shelton Street branch of Rokit, a vintage institution which has resold more than a million tonnes of pre-worn clothing since the first branch opened in Camden market in 1986. Today Rokit's business is booming: it has expanded to four shops in London, has huge web sales, and even employs a team of people who transform and repair clothing that otherwise could never be resold into trendy, wanted items. Vintage is definitely IN.
Second-hand clothes hunting requires you to change your mind as a shopper. Walk into a high street store and you will see ready-made complete looks on mannequins, and the store has stock in different sizes. In a second-hand store, you have to look harder and use your imagination. You have to take a different approach: it helps to remind yourself that while new clothes look great on the shop floor, second-hand clothes are the opposite—these pieces often look unattractive in the shop and come into their own once you get them home.
If you want to find used clothes that look current, looking at labels for designer brands is not the best advice. Instead, zoom in on today's colours, shapes and details. Anything classic, like a blazer or a wool cardigan, is always a good buy if it is the right colour.
The preconception with vintage is that it's all baby blue polyester dresses, jackets with massive shoulder pads or horrible brown suits, but that's just not the case these days. The circular economy is perfectly suited to young people's commitment to recycling and creating a more sustainable world. The production of polyester alone is one of the world's most polluting industries because it depends on burning petroleum oil, so anything and everything we can do to reduce fast fashion and its carbon footprint should be our goal. Fashion is cyclical, after all. The fact is that the original of what you are looking for will be out there if you look hard enough.