There is a special relationship that fashion has with the body, one marked by time. A singular time, which we perceive as a personal reservoir of memories and disturbs us with its impassive age progression, and a plural time, to explain which the famous definition that Italo Calvino coined of the classics comes to mind: “What hides in the folds of memory camouflaging itself as a collective or individual unconscious ». Obviously the writer was referring to timeless novels and essays, but his statement could very well also refer to clothes and accessories which, with their symbolic effect, provide an escape from the current situation, perform a compensatory function and satisfy the desire to feel elsewhere. In recent years the fashion system, in spite of an increasingly invasive presence of technology, looks more and more to the past as a reserve of images and quotes that return to the present taking on new meanings. In this regard, the scholar Patrizia Calefato recalls what the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about fashion and its “tiger leap” process: «Fashion has a sense of the present, wherever it lives in the forest of the past. It is a tiger leap of the past ».
Since a new attitude to personalization is also emerging with ever greater clarity, to the culture of the unicum even if obtained through industrial methods, the phenomenon of vintage has become increasingly popular. A term that does not derive from the French number twenty (twenty) which could mistakenly lead us to believe that just to be considered vintage, a garment or accessory must be at least twenty years old, but from old French salesman, which indicated vintage wines of great value. The image that evokes this phenomenon, unlike the second-hand – second-hand garments – is therefore not that of the market where everyday objects from distant seasons are sold, but that of a cellar (or perhaps it is better to speak of a vault ?), where you can find clothes or accessories from history, if not legendary, certainly remarkable.
The standard bearers of taste
Vintage abandons the past to become an attribute of something that is the standard bearer of taste and value acquired over the years, and nowadays it represents a source of inspiration for contemporary style, where archives become a reserve for new ideas, for new stimuli and to activate new creative processes. This allows us to understand how it is so desired today on a transgenerational level, from teenagers hoping to make a big splash by finding a Chanel jacket in a shop or buying on an app like Vinted, to wealthy ladies who sell, buy and exchange theirs. Hermès or Gucci bags (the latter, a brand that just recently inaugurated Vault, an online showcase of vintage garments or even antique one-off pieces restored by the maison) on prestigious sites of charm. To those who, like the writer, are a boomer, or rather belong to the ranks of those born between ’55 and ’65, this type of consumption brings out a smile: the goods used, in particular fashion, were born during the phase of youth and feminist protest in which the rejection of bourgeois culture was also expressed through the adoption of deliberately poor and “antiquated” styles, characterized by a strong political component.
The countercultures
A sort of ideological uniform with which, during ’68 and its surroundings, young people expressed their distance from materialist culture, inaugurating countercultural lifestyles, in which the codes of fashion were therefore redefining themselves. But today, my peers, could we still argue that everything used is not new? If we looked at the concept from the point of view of those who buy a good already in circulation, it is a very new good, understood as not yet consumed. Indeed, it is completely unknown to him. And it responds, in addition to those criteria of originality and uniqueness which we have already mentioned, to a more widespread feeling that belongs to Generation Z, practically the children or grandchildren of the boomers: regret for a period that they have not lived, but in them, through the tales of their ancestors, has turned into a golden age to be reproduced by putting it on.
The wall of memories
Let’s face it: the love for sustainability, the reuse of clothes from grandmothers and mothers, the circular economy, the attention to Climate Change yes, it has to do with it. But very, very little. And we feel sorry for Greta Thunberg. We are in the midst of the “economy of nostalgia”, as the American online magazine Quartz has dubbed it. The success of TV series such as Stranger Things, entirely set in the 1980s, the resumption of Sex and The City what time is it called And Just Like that, with the actresses of the first round now closer to their sixties than their fifties, the reboot of Gossip Girl or Dynasty, the covers of songs from the nineties: we live in a world where, in a certain sense, it is easy to look back on a ‘era in which we were not born because it leads us to see the past as a place of the spirit where all things were safe. On the web, history has become a wall of memories. In social networks there is a sort of democracy of eternity: Pinterest boards like “do you remember this?”, Photos with the hashtag #TBT on Instagram (The hashtag stands for Throwback Thursday: every Thursday, a photo from when you were young) give the time an insignificant yet meaningful quality. You want to call up, as a lifeline, that kind of emotional response when you see something that was important at an earlier time. A request so intense that the brands that produce old-fashioned but fake garments are multiplying (but they are also on sale in the temples of the antithesis of vintage, the shops of the fast fashion chains): artfully aged jeans, worn bags mechanically, little forties girls’ bow blouses, eighties blazers with huge shoulders, fifties corolla skirts, seventies flared jeans, sixties black sheath dresses. And so, the circle closes: the new, today, includes something already known and precisely for this reason, in times of pandemics, revolutions, environmental disasters and incompetent governments, it makes us dress the present with soothing, pacified, serene aesthetics. We feel safer inside the replicas of symbols of a happier era. Which, to those who have not lived it, appears just like this.
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