PAST PERFECT
What qualifies as “vintage” is becoming ever more recent. SLOANE CROSLEY finds that hindsight may not be 20/20 but it still looks great.
I was standing. It was May 2006, and I was attending a publishing convention when I felt a splash of hot coffee on my calves. And I remember what I was wearing: a Chloé prancing-horse skirt that I’d purchased on a financially delusional whim five years prior. This was an item deeply of its time—low-slung, sheer, clingy. A convention is no place for a skirt of this calibre or style, which could explain the karmic coffee punishment. The spiller offered to pay for dry cleaning, but I knew the skirt’s best days were behind it. And yet here we are, 14 years later, and it’s still taking up precious space in my closet.
There’s no way I’m getting rid of an item that’s triply iconic—for my own life, for the period during which it was manufactured and for the brand itself. (Those horses originated in Stella McCartney’s stable.) And it seems I’m not alone in my attachment. Coffee or no coffee, the skirt stands out as an enviable turn-of-the-century item, emblematic of the late ’90s and early aughts neo-vintage nostalgia for which seemingly every young celebrity is jonesing. Bella Hadid has a penchant for Y2K-era Dior and Cavalli and has been photographed wearing her collection of 18th-centuryby-way-of-the-’80s Vivienne Westwood corsets so many times that Westwood has announced she’s reissuing them. The Kardashians and Cardi B are in a demolition-derby-level race to see who can wear the rarest vintage Jean Paul Gaultier. Last year, Rihanna stepped out in a kimono from the indelible spring/summer 1995 John Galliano show. And in September, Adwoa Aboah donned an emerald column gown of Tom Ford-era Gucci.
According to Cameron Silver, founder of the vintage emporium Decades in Los Angeles, “It’s only natural that as historic vintage has become more socially acceptable, neo-vintage would be the next frontier.” He’s noticed that even some high-schoolers would “rather wear a Todd Oldham or Christian Lacroix dress to prom than something from the mall.” Indeed, there’s something lighthearted and sly about drawing from the more recent past. For years, red carpets have been strewn with mid-20th-century pieces, but there’s always an air of solemnity to the proceedings when these women are asked what they’re wearing, as if to say “Let us now take a moment to visualize me as an MGM star.” Fresher iterations of history transmit an air of fun.
The decades in question also represent a generally rosier time. As impractical as my Chloé skirt was for my own wallet, it was acquired when the world wasn’t demonstrably on fire. When celebrities wear clothing from this period now, they do so with a great familiarity with the events that followed—events that shaped their own lives. They are not glorifying the past, as we have often done with older vintage pieces, wilfully ignoring the social unrest of those decades. When Aboah wore that Gucci dress, she left behind the lush-green stole that accompanied it and modernized it with stacks of bracelets and rings instead. This is the spirit with which I intend to take my Chloé skirt out of the closet this season: partly because I am not in possession of a Gucci stole and partly because, in the right light, you can still see the coffee stains—signs of a past I remember fondly.