Friday, July 31, 2009

So What's Vintage ?





well with wine it's a substitute word for "made in the year"...as in "this merlot is vintage 1990" = "this merlot was made with grapes picked in 1990"

(it was probably bottled some time after that)

With vintage clothes, jewelry, accessories and footwear, and headwear...vintage is at least 20 years old...See the difference?
Vintage, when applied to clothing etc, isn't a word that means "a year" or even "circa"...it means at least x number of years old, relative to the current year.


If you bought something new in 2004, it's not vintage in 2009. It's old, or used, or out of style. It may be perfectly wonderful...
but it isn't vintage...not yet! There are even some more hard-line purists that define vintage clothes as those that are older than 1970.

With the current and likely unending rise in popularity of "vintage" and "used" and "clothing swaps and exchanges", the right words need to be used for accuracy.

To read more about vintage clothes and the whole big wide world of vintage...go here...it's an amazing resource !

So, here in Tacoma, the best Vintage Clothing stores are VANITY, and GLENNA'S...
Orange is great, as is Pure, as are all the others...but for sheer abundance of glamor and choice of decades, those 2 stores, Vanity and Glenna's... really rock the older, harder to find, vintage!

Any day of the week you can walk into Vanity on 6th Ave, or Glenna's on Broadway, and get blown away by 50s leopard jackets, or 60s pillbox hats, or 40s rayon crepe dresses, or 30s bias cut satin gowns...


Me, funkoma, like the other vintage stores in Tacoma, do have glammy stuff! We be cool....
I think we specialize in the more everyday, more accessible daily wear...
Also, our prices are more affordable...because what we sell is still more easily found out there.


The reason a 50s leopard, a 60s pillbox, a 40s rayon, a 30s bias...is quite a bit of $$ is the rarity (and condition)...

These are just the facts of life about our industry...
Love your exchange store...this for that...but know the difference between vintage, and used clothes.
And...the most rare of all?
It's a large or plus-size...
Because people used to be smaller back in the day...
that's all, therefore the larger sizes are very rare...and rarity figures into availability and price.

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