Something Old, Something New

By Kate Novack

At Foley & Corinna in New York City, A new, peppermint pink bustier glows beside a 1962 cotton sundress and a Christian Dior cashmere sweater circa 1980. Shoppers at Vylette in Austin, Texas, peruse the latest collections from Lacoste and Marc by Marc Jacobs along with vintage khaki skirts and crocheted sweaters--many of them rescued from oblivion by one of the store owners' mothers, who frequents garage sales.

Shopping for vintage used to mean digging through dusty bins under fluorescent lights at the Salvation Army store or having a friend tip you off to that tiny, off-the-beaten-path consignment shop. But today, threads from the past are a ubiquitous and accessible part of fashion, and retailers across the country--including department stores like Bloomingdale's and Henri Bendel in New York City--sell vintage alongside contemporary collections. "It's as if it was another label," says Tiffany Dubin, the author of Vintage Style: Buying and Wearing Classic Vintage Clothes, who introduced couture auctions to Sotheby's in 1997 and owns the vintage outpost Lair ("an uptown tag sale," she says) at Bendel.

Vintage is penetrating the racks in less obvious ways as well. Innovative designers such as Koi Suwannagate are "re-purposing" used apparel and fabrics--from 1920s silk slips to '60s men's sweaters--to create new collections. And major designers--like Prada, whose printed circle skirts for spring are unabashedly reminiscent of the '50s--are more overtly drawing on bygone decades for inspiration. The result of all this is that the past is now an inextricable part of present fashion--on the runway, on the red carpet and on the rack. What's old is new, and what's new is old.

"It's more than just having a store that sells vintage and new; the two really inform each other," says Dana Foley, a former playwright who designs the Foley line for Foley & Corinna, while her partner, Anna Corinna, scours the globe for vintage pieces. "Seeing girls pick out vintage, you get a feel for the trends," Foley observes. "Two years ago, girls were buying ripped Victorian lace, and the next season you were seeing it on the runway."

As mass production continues to homogenize fashion and, season after season, magazines declare the same three pieces the "it" looks of the moment, vintage offers a more personalized--and often more affordable--alternative to what's coming off the runway or stocking the shelves at Banana Republic. Its popularity has also been boosted by celebrity endorsements: legions of stars regularly don vintage to walk the red carpet. Jennifer Aniston, Gwen Stefani, Kim Cattrall, Christina Ricci were among the luminaries who showed up at the Golden Globes in January in vintage gowns. Others wore clothes that loudly sampled the past (Nicole Kidman's dress from Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche's spring 2004 line was utterly, though many said unsightly, Art Deco).

The celebrity limelight certainly helped four years ago, when Barneys New York partnered with Cameron Silver of the Los Angeles vintage emporium Decades to introduce a limited line of vintage to the sales floor. "There was a spirit in fashion that was very vintage oriented, and it was being validated by people being photographed wearing vintage," says Barneys New York fashion director Julie Gilhart, who now sells the Decades line at trunk shows. "All of a sudden [vintage] was garnering this energy."

New York City's latest addition to the roster of boutiques selling the old with the new is Lyell, a lovingly designed shop with a stamped tin ceiling and authentic '40s wallpaper. It sells a well-edited collection of vintage garb and shoes alongside co-owner Emma Fletcher's Lyell line of "vintage-inspired clothes." A circa 1960 Kelly green butterfly-print dress by Japanese designer Hanae Mori and a '70s-era black pleated skirt with a red Provencal-print border hang beside Fletcher's new collection of tulip-print, silk-chiffon tie blouses, velvet jackets lined in silk and '40s-style dresses (the designer's personal favorite: a black silk-and-wool number with deer-shaped cutouts just below the collarbone).

Fletcher's pretty blouses may be the ultimate style statement, but they're also a refreshing antidote to the evanescence of fashion. "There is a segment of the population that feels a little uncomfortable with consumerism in general and likes the idea of recycling clothes from the past," says Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.). "Rather than buying a new slip dress, you find a slip from the 1930s that has been redyed."

That's just what Lorraine Kirke is doing at her new, shabby-chic-style boutique, Geminola, in the West Village in New York City, where she sells her color-saturated, redyed-satin vintage concoctions along with select fashionista staples like Rogan jeans and C&C California T shirts. In Los Angeles, Koi Suwannagate, 35, sends "pickers" to yard sales to dig up old cashmere sweaters, which she cuts up and then resews into one-of-a-kind creations. "I look at it like an art piece," says Suwannagate, whose prices ($800 to $1,700 for a sweater) reflect intense workmanship--two days, with the help of two sewers, are needed for each sweater.

These literal quotes from the past, along with more figurative ones like Kidman's dress, are part of the natural evolution of fashion, says F.I.T.'s Steele. She notes, "If you think of fashion as a language, you use old words to make new statements."

New Orleans mainstay Trashy Diva originally sold only vintage when it opened its doors in the French Quarter in 1996. The shop added its own two-piece collection--a "charm gown" and a silk-charmeuse flapper coat--in 1999, when it became more difficult to find used designs from the 1920s and '30s in good condition. Today, the store sells mostly its (expanded) Trashy Diva line, with pieces that look as if they might have been plucked from Daisy Buchanan's closet.

Even high-profile designers are no longer shy about their touchstones: Carolina Herrera proudly dedicated her fall 2003 collection to the women of Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. "It's very funny how we talk," says Barneys' Gilhart. "We have been in that cycle of fashion where nobody says, 'Oh, that's so 2004.'"

So if you want to predict what's ahead, your best bet may be to look back. Just ask the vintage aficionados, some of whose best customers are fashion designers in search of inspiration. "Gucci bought [1960s] bathing suits and told us to look for [them] on the runway," says Sara George, a co-owner of Miami Twice, a 5,000-sq.-ft. smorgasbord of everything from new $8 tank tops to $2,500 Civil War--era Irish-lace wedding gowns. Anna Corinna is always on the lookout for pieces for designers. And though she won't name names, she will offer a glimpse of what could be on the way: "One designer called recently and wanted Cleopatra jewelry. Another was looking for anything with a starfish theme--bags, belts, shoes." Another asked for "Chanel-like things, but a little crazier."

Derivative? Maybe. But it makes sense. "Vintage roots us. It is an expression of our history that is wearable and gives us a sense of place and security in very insecure times," says Clair Watson, who heads the couture, textiles and fine-costume-jewelry department at the auction house Doyle New York. "Not only is fashion a business that breeds insecurity anyway, right now current fashion moves so fast that it is reassuring to wear something that has outlasted its period, that retains its allure beyond the dictates of now." And, come to think of it, it's so 2004.