I PICKED up some second-hand shoes the other day from a vintage clothes shop. A nice pair of Chelsea boots from the 70s. I like retro clothes, one reason being that wearing flares or dungarees marks me out as a true individual in a time of mass conformism. Even though at times I look like a prat, at least I don't look like my entire life was manufactured by some corporation. It's a pathetic art-farty self-delusion, I know, but such myths help me get through the day.
In the shop, girlfriend was taking her time, trying on 70s polyester dresses and I got chatting to the shop owner.
"So what do you get most of these days, period wise?"
"Actually, we're having a bit of crisis," she replied. "We're running out
of vintage. It's been months since we've had anything from the 50s or 60s – the 40s dried up last year. Mostly we're inundated with stuff from the 80s."
The 80s could be termed vintage? That shocked me. Am I really that old?
"I've got so many Lady Di outfits I just can't shift them," she said. That struck me as unfortunate but also weird – because the Lady Di look was itself a recycling of the prissy virginal 50s look.
My mind was spinning with ghost images of 80s fashion hell: peddle-pushers, parachute pants, ankle socks, knitted square-ended ties, Swatches, oversized shirts, leg warmers and jelly shoes, the crummy recycling of punk that was the New Romantic look.
Now kids would go into retro shops and buy all this "wacky old stuff". Like flared jeans from 1988, when the Manchester music scene brought the 60s back into fashion for a year. Would these kids think flares originated in the 80s? What would it be like to buy an 'authentic' pair of 80s stonewashed jeans which themselves had been deliberately 'distressed' to look like they came from the 60s.
Would that fact that they were now 25 years old make these fakes in some way more real? Is history truly being lost? Does Francis Fukuyama's prediction of consumerism as the end of history have its most vivid embodiment in the crisis facing a retro shop?
"We're running out of vintage."
Then I thought, what the hell is going to happen when we start recycling 90s fashion? Given that the 90s was the post-modern eclectic decade in which the 50s, 60s and 70s were recycled in every shape and form. It is a dismal thought that retro shops in the future will be selling us back other decades' fashions because no one had the foresight to design anything truly new in the 90s.
I suppose this is just one of the sad things about our era. Eventually all the grannies will be long dead and their clothes will all be gone from the second-hand shops and then it'll be the rags of the mums from my generation that fill the shelves when they die and so on, till all trace of the old authentic, the eccentric and the handmade will be gone and all we'll be left with will be factory-produced copies of copies of copies.
I can see it now, in the year 2030. A retro shop owner will ask: "How about a pair of distressed jeans from 2009, that emulate the look of distressed jeans from 1986, that emulate the look of genuine 100% old jeans from 1968?" This is all very distressing.
