This weekend I attended a Vintage Festival in my hometown. It’s an event that has been running for a few years now, spanning across two days with over 30 stalls boasting the best in vintage and custom made clothing and accessories, as well as trinket stalls, face-painting, live music and a selection of food and drink.
The steady increase in demand for vintage and its every increasing popularity has flourished over the last few years and it has never been more apparent than when faced with events like this. The vintage and retro styles are quirky, fun and can be customised to suit particular tastes from the 1940s right through to the 1990s. However, despite the boom in the retro/vintage, and the unique styles available from different eras, I can’t help but think that recently, these styles seem to be merging into one. Are we fed up of this boom? Have we had enough of vintage? And is it now so mainstream that it’s actually lost its shine?
Not long ago it seemed like you had to be a certain type of person to pull off the vintage look; I’m talking lifestyle here, effortlessly constructed outfits, put together by carefully selecting items of clothing and accessories, teamed with the perfect shade of lipstick or appropriate headgear. Quaint home and kitchen-wear, with gingham fabrics and retro weighing scales etc being sought out from haberdasheries across the country; a rise in the number of VW Campervans on the road and a love for all things 1940s. However, it now appears that everyone seems to be striving for this look. From distressed leather bags, and brogues worn with socks, to headscarves made from patches of surplus material, to midi skirts with retro flower prints; you’ll find a vintage clone on every high street corner and quite frankly, I’m pretty much over it.
I first noticed a surge in this trend when the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters started reappearing, after a sixty year hiatus. In the beginning they looked rather cool, typically hung on the wall in a quirky looking kitchen of some kitsch-loving young professional couple living in West Didsbury or Dalston but now, the saturation of this once morale-boosting slogan that first appeared in 1939, that was seen as trendy among the ‘hip’ has begun to grip the nation and find its way into the hands of the chavs, the uncool, the non-vintage; albeit slowly modified over subsequent months to accommodate any kind of random slogan a person may feel needed attention, ie ‘Keep Calm and Stay Awesome’, ‘Keep Calm and Go Shopping’, ‘Keep Calm and Hug a Hoodie’ etc. When something that is once seen as cool becomes milked to the death and saturates the commercial market so that it becomes so undesirable, that the trendy couple from Dalston have removed it from their kitchen and replaced it with something more unique then you know there’s something amiss. I’d probably do the same – I’d rather have gone without ever having a ‘Keep Calm and..’ poster, a vintage leather bag or a love for all things VW than to now own something that every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be consuming, still thinking they’re at the heights of uber-coolness.
I may be sounding a touch elitist, pretentious or fascist here but please, hear me out. The very same argument can be applied to the Hipster sub-culture that thrives in cities and towns across the country, if not the globe. Take for example the humble beard – beards are in abundance at the moment; everywhere you go there’s a beard, you can’t avoid them. From the groomed and styled, to the downright impressive facial art that could give anyone from Zac Dingle to ‘Ol St Nicholas a run for their money! Advertisers and marketers have jumped on the craze and have produced moustache/beard merchandise that can be found in any card/gift/craft shop on any high street across Britain. The same can be said for Hipster Specs, everywhere you look there’s a set of thick, black-rimmed glasses adorning the face of some youthful looking wannabe (I am guilty of buying into this, hands up guilty, although for some reason I’ve struggled with the beard growing). What was once considered dorkish, bookish or geeky is now a revered image to strive for.
Being a Hipster isn’t just about perfecting the look though which these days is all too easy to replicate. It’s about adopting a lifestyle, living, breathing and embracing all things retro and seemingly uncool, and the majority of hipster wannabes today, I can guarantee you, do not drink Fair Trade tea out of plant pots, or ponder over the works of Jack Kerouac, while simultaneously dismantling a fixed-gear push bike and discussing which vinyl record they’re most looking forward to hearing in full when attending the local alternative art-gallery exhibition which just so happens to be in the toilet cubicle of an old abattoir. We can’t forget either, that the original hipsters were in fact our Fathers; they didn’t require any effort to pull off a look that these days is so sought after. This book proves it.
Vintage is another honed lifestyle choice (although you could probably bung vintage/retro and hipster into the same basket) which requires effort to perfect, that is unless you’re lucky enough to have an eye for style and can pull off wearing a pair of old curtains as a two-piece culottes and cardigan set. Anyone can slap a bit of red lipstick on and cut a rug in the latest denim shirt-high-waisted midi skirt combo but it does take a certain someone to immerse themselves completely in the lifestyle, seeking out antique furniture to decorate a room with, and creating a mish-mash of varying fabrics on an old Singer sewing machine which will befit the cushions intended to be strewn across the aged Chesterfield sofa acquired from the garden sale that was stumbled across in idyllic suburbia one mediocre Sunday morning.
Vintage shops and stalls are popping up everywhere and it seems with the rise of Social Media that you are never too far away from someone who is trialing a ‘pop-up shop’ or creating retro cushion covers, or holding vintage fetes in small parks on the outskirts of a bustling city. I love a bit of vintage; having a rummage and coming across something quite special, unique and ultimately not costly is a great way to spend a free afternoon but is it not all becoming a little tiresome?
The way I see it is that being Vintage or Hipster is about being individual, creating a look and image that works for you and no-one else. It’s about shunning the mainstream and mocking those who choose to follow the crowd. However, these sub-cultures have now become so prolific that personally, although attracted to the lifestyle myself, and having an innate desire to be able to look so effortlessly cool (but failing to achieve or pull off because I have no discerning sense of unique style whatsoever…unfortunately), I’m quite put off by it all.
I don’t want to be a sheep who only cares about what I’m wearing because someone else looked cool in a similar outfit and, ‘everyone likes vintage so I must like it’. That to me is when it starts to lose its shine – when everyone jumps on the bandwagon, it effectively ruins the look.
I want alternative trends to remain just that – alternative; I want them to scream individuality and to only appeal to certain groups or sub-cultures in society (think the goths and emo kids of days gone by). I think that’s what makes them so endearing and attractive. I’m not saying let’s create huge factions and elite or highly superficial groups (which could lead to outcasting or bullying) out of the way we dress and choose to live our lives, but some variation, some differentiation, some originality and some character in our choices would be nice, if not only to edge away from this clone culture we seem to be veering into where the youth of today appear to be trying too hard to be ‘different’ while sadly, all looking exactly the same.
Striving too hard to obtain a certain image only results in that image being ruined, saturated and facing the threat of becoming a tiny bit boring. Unfortunately, for me, the Vintage and the Hipster have started to wear themselves thin as I’m bombarded with the same ‘try-hards’ everywhere I turn. I’m ready for something new, something fresh and something that will hopefully remain underground and alternative enough for it to be considered non-mainstream…and long enough for me to enjoy it before commercialisation rears its ugly head.
Let’s then, look to a new craze or trend shall we? But instead of instagramming it and bragging about it until it inevitably explodes into something that no longer remains sacred to a privileged few, let’s keep it low-key, let’s keep it marginally uncool, because we all know, god forbid, that the moment something becomes cool, it actually loses the very thing that made it cool in the first place.
You may not all agree with me. And my arguments may not stand up straight in a court of law, but from where I’m sitting I can see that the Vintage/Retro/Hipster styles that I so dearly love are slowly losing their appeal. Therefore, to cheesily draw this to an end, I’ll refer you to genius music legends Groove Armada, who once sang: “If everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other”. And yeah, I am tired, so let’s whack out the old shell-suit jacket and high-top trainers and have a party on a rooftop, equipped with tape-deck boombox and…oh wait…that’s been done already? Shit.
Chasing Amy-Lou 