When I was a London teenager, I trolled Portobello Road every Saturday with my friends Jane and Emily, looking for cheap and fascinating old clothes. We only wanted dresses from the 1920s, the straight shift dresses the bob-haired flappers wore to dance the Charleston and smoke cigarettes. The twenties informed and inspired the clothes of the 1960s, as 1930 to 1949 informed the 1970s, as 1940s wartime shoulder pads inspired the 1980s, as the 1990s rehashed the padded graphic textiles of the 1950s, and stocky Queen Elizabeth II coats. It was easy for the sixties designers to copy those simpler dresses, and by making them very short, they gave Swinging London its look.
In buying old clothes I wasn't following fashion, but leading it around. My prize possession was beyond exquisite and thoroughly mysterious: a black tulle Egyptian kaftan and its shawl, decorated with the same pattern of flat silver strips the size of staples. Years later I learned the technique was called "Assuit."
When I went to college in America, I brought a trunk of antique clothes that attracted the attention of editors at Glamour, who were so impressed by the flapper dresses and the black tulle Assuit kaftan that soon I was a fashion assistant, who incidentally wrote book reviews.
My first boss at Glamour, Frances Stein, who was to go on to design Chanel handbags, borrowed the Assuit Kaftan for a movie premiere, for which I never forgave her. My second boss, Julie Britt, frustrated by the mass-made all-American clothes she had to photograph, cared only for the hand-made, the rare, the exotic, the antique. At the warehouse for Odyssey, the prime importer of hippie Indian silks, Julie helped me find a 100-year-old Chinese skirt. The only tolerable shop was Henri Bendel, a small department store full of mainstream treasures, with Kenneth Jay Lane jewelry on the main floor. But it was too commercial for me, and far too expensive.
Artwork by ADAM FUSS, Medusa, from the series 'Home and the World', 2010 Ⓒ Adam Fuss, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
When I was 21 and back in London, Henri Bendel briefly hired me as a fashion scout to give them the inside scoop on hot European trends. Their fashion director, Jean Rosenberg, came to London to see what I'd found.
I showed her my cream satin Shanghai pajamas with the pink medallion, my cream silk sweater with orange scalloped edges, and unfolded my supreme treasure, the black tulle Egyptian Assuit kaftan and shawl, once borrowed by Frances Stein.
Jean Rosenberg was almost amenable, but asked "How can we stock them? Where do you get them?"
I explained that "stock" and "them" didn't exist when it came to treasures; there was no them, because each piece was a discovery, an adventure, a hunt. I took her on a hunt to Portobello Road, to the Chelsea Antique Market, to my favorite stalls in a store on Kensington High Street.
"We can't sell secondhand clothes!" she said.
Bendel's gave the vintage thing a minor try, and gave up. Karl Lagerfeld became a friend; he loved old clothes as much as I did, and at a couture dealer's place behind La Republique, bought me a jacket that might have been Schiaparelli. I wore it from 1972 onwards, and have it still. Old clothes never die, though they might at some point choose to disintegrate.
"Someone probably died so you could buy this dress."
Old clothes have only gotten better, and rarer. And they will get you through anything.
The past is alive — if not always in peak condition — at secondhand shops, thrift stores, resale places, charity sales, high-end vintage boutiques.
Some places honor their old clothes and display them with respect; others imperil them on wire hangers, so that each purchase feels like a rescue mission.
You arrive at the store, booth, stall, church hall, street market, loft, or dark back room, your antennae bobbing, essential oil infused Kleenex to your nose to navigate the fug, nostrils flared to locate treasure by its emanations of ancient scents — Madame Rochas, Miss Dior, Patou's 1000, Chanel Nº 5 — your palms open to capture the nap of velvet, backs of your hands ready to rub against silk, fingers pinched to ride the ridges of wide-wale corduroy and the thin rails of ottoman silk.
And fur, is that fur? Fake fur? Yes, fake because it's shiny underneath and full of static, while real fur has a certain weight and the hairs end in points. Why are felt hats said to be made of rabbit fur? Or beaver fur? Does that mean real fur? (Yes. But it's been made into felt. And it's old. And if you are upset about dead animals, old clothes are not for you.)
What is "moleskin" without an e, as opposed to Moleskine with an e, the notebooks? Thick canvas.
Why do so many old "cocktail" hats look like velvet punctuation marks? Because women were supposed to listen and nod.
The point of the hunt for vintage is the joy of browsing, of accidental learning as your focus gently sharpens until you turn panther and are stalking the surprise you didn't know you were looking for. The moment you find it is falling in love.
Aha!
Yes!
Absolutely!
You don't fall in love with a shopping list.
Unless you are so conditioned by swiping that you need a shopping list for love, with a non-negotiable list of desires, preferences, and red flags.
If you have to know what you want before you shop, your time-travel has to go through the resale sites where the items on offer come with descriptions that range from the painstaking to the haphazard to the total goof mistake. This changes the hunt from the IRL version, as mislabeling opens the door to bargains and master coups. Unlike the stores and rummage sales, the sites include written condition reports from New With Tags to Pristine to Excellent to Very Good down to Good, Fair, and oh the shame, As Is. In the last few categories, the word residue is frequent, most often "at neckline and armpits."
You don't know what you're getting unless you take a close look. Clothes go on your anatomy, they're an anatomy lesson that needs a cool, calm head. In a store you open the bodice, squint at the armpit, examine the inside of a crotch, take a sniff . You can't be squeamish about checking what you are going to put right against your naked flesh.
But beyond what you learn from your sight, touch, and smell — hearing doesn't apply, taste would be taking it too far — there is more information you need.
Auction houses will give you provenance; great resale stores like Cameron Silver's now-closed Decades ran on the pedigree of their stock, the story of each piece.
No thrift store or site will tell you when the vintage items were made, where they were made, or who wore them.
You need a guide to teach you the language when you meet swing coats cut on the bias, shoulder pads, charmeuse teddies, girdle corsets made of rubber and rebar, peplum jackets, sack dresses, wedge-heeled suede sandals, chiffon flapper dresses, parasols, crepe de chine boudoir wraps, Spanish shawls, crinoline skirts, kimonos, lederhosen, when you set out to find potential costume treasures lost among flaking Naugahyde biker jackets, drooping stinky raincoats, and uh-oh — what's with the red crepe dress that's a good shape but is giving off something disturbing and potentially noxious?
Old magazines are not the guide you want, nor are the glossy coffee table books put out by Vogue or Logo houses to hammer awareness of their brands deeper into the culture.
You need straightforward line drawings to show you how shapes evolved. One book will teach you everything you need about clothing from 3000 BC in Egypt to Paris in 1956 AD, two years before the last revised edition was published by Scribner's in 1958.
The Mode in Costume was old when I first saw it, and like the Schiaparelli jacket, I've kept it to this day. Its sober, richly informative text by Mrs. R. Turner Wilcox is set between pages of black-and-white line drawings Mrs. R. Turner Wilcox, about whom I only know that she had been the fashion editor of Women's Wear Daily from 1910 to 1915 and lived in Tenafly, New Jersey. Her first name remains a mystery.
Mrs. R Turner Wilcox will make clear the difference between a redingote and a frock coat; her simple yet decisive lines highlight the naps of different furs, and she has a unique gift for rendering the difference between the transparent lightness of a harem veil attached to a black straw boater in 1918, and the transparent sturdiness of a plastic 1940 California rainboot. Most of all, the drawings of Mrs. R. Turner Wilcox capture the allure of each period so accurately that you can feel the aspirations of people in her drawings.
Clothes are tied to essence, but essence has more than one meaning, which brings me to the second important point about old clothes.
Someone probably died so you could buy this dress.
It's not an accident that the ideal places to find the least worn, once most expensive, best preserved clothes are the places where the rich go to die.
Miami. Palm Beach. Tampa. San Diego. Phoenix. Tucson, where the great mothership of thrift shops, Buffalo Exchange was born in 1974, followed in 1979 by the Tucson Thrift Shop, which bluntly named its second space The Other Side.
How do you feel about wearing the clothes of dead strangers?
And what's coming off that red crepe dress back there, where I was listing the shawls and kimonos and Lederhosen? Is it a residue of the wrong perfume, a mere fug, or a vibration from an essence of something sad or bad?
If the owner is alive, maybe they sold it because they needed the money, which would be sad. Or had a bad time wearing it. Or maybe they did something bad in it.
Twenty-five years ago, a Feng Shui man looked around my living room and winced.
" Antiques!" he said, "Did you buy or inherit?"
"I go to the Flea market a lot," I said.
He shook his head, raised his hand, and told me sternly that I was never to bring anything secondhand into my home or my life, without first rubbing it down with Holy Water.
Holy Water?
"Yes," he said, "It doesn't matter what your religion is, but if there is anything —", and here he made a grimace to indicate evil intent, foul miasmas, residue beyond the organic and chemical, "— anything at all, the Holy Water and a good prayer will clean it out. But please do it every time."
And that is why a few weeks ago, having run out of holy water, I found myself gatecrashing a funeral at Saint Patrick's Cathedral with two empty plastic bottles in my good leather bag. One from the Sanctuary at Chimayo, the other from Saint Patrick's.
A man barred the doorway on the excuse that there was a private funeral going on.
My hair was clean, my tailored coat was excellent vintage, my shoes were leather. I said "thank you," and sailed past him into the Cathedral, past uniformed and possibly armed men who held dogs — sniffer dogs? attack dogs? — on short leashes. I marched past tables holding programs, in a straight line towards the holy water dispenser.
Once I'd filled my two bottles, I darted into the gift shop for one more, because these times demand protection both physical and spiritual. Uniforms, dogs, and guns were not the best sign. Vintage tailoring got me in; Holy Water would get me through.