The best thing about vintage clothing - better than finding an original Jeanne Lanvin dropwaist overshirt, better than seeing your grandmother's wedding dress, lace as pearly as if it was the big day, better than unearthing the perfect pair of distressed Levi's for less than a fiver - is that it's like having your own personal time travel machine.
Forget waiting around for David Tennant to park his deliciously deceptive ('oh, it's bigger on the inside!') police call box T.A.R.D.I.S in your backyard, all you need to traverse the roads of time, and sometimes space, is enough money for a trip to the nearest op shop, a brief perusal of ebay, or, if money is tight - and when isn't it these days - the upwards mobility towards your nearest attic, grandmother's tea chests or removalists' boxes never unpacked and shoved in dark corners. The finest lucky dip there is, where each slightly musty garment is the key to a journey somewhere marvelous.
And just like in normal, country to country travel every destination is as fascinating as the next. The broderie anglaise sundress, handmade by my grandmother when she was just 15, material sourced from the local markets, tells a tale of sweltering australian summers. So hot your feet burnt as they made small steps across the cracked clay of the ground. When I loop each button I become my grandmother, yearning for something beautiful in her life, making an impractical sundress out of white lace. Spending each summer day, lounging around on the banks of a creek, dangling her feet into the water, dragging her feet in the orange sand, the stains of ochre dust still visible on the hem. With a pair of worn in sandals and a yearning look on my face I can be in that 1950s summer, longing for adventure and beauty, just like my grandmother.
If you don't know the story, or the destination, you can just invent it yourself - perfectly easy with a vivid imagination and some inspiration from films, music and books. After spending one lovelorn summer nursing a broken heart by listening to billie holiday on repeat it seemed that everything i wore had a 1930s twist. I spent stolen hours after school and weekends rifling through the racks of my local charity store and favourite vintage store searching for day heels, calf length a-line skirts, velvet shawl jackets with fringed sleeves, loopy beads, romantic blouses and houndstooth jackets with nipped in waists.
As i sauntered out of taxis, clicked my small heels across parquet floors and followed friends into parties I wasn't a 17 year old girl completing her HSC and getting over a bad relationship, i was a glamorous Hon., the equal of any Idina Sackville-West for chic and cheek, at once canny and coy. My friend and I used to trade letters sealed with lipstick kisses from our alter egos 'Lola' and 'Evie', telling of lives lived across Europe, from tiny, freezing, garrets in Paris to sprawling apartments in St Petersburg. We couldn't face the horrors of all night study and overbearing mothers, so we escaped into these other girls of indiscriminate age, background and time period, well shod and even better dressed, spying potential lovers in the corner of our golden compact mirrors.
Even better is when you are suddenly inspired by something you've just bought. One of the most strangely liberating moments of my life was when i went out one night in a plain black top, leggings and ballet flats. With my short cropped hair and cat-eye flick eyeliner i was every inch the 1960s ingenue i envisaged myself to be, my legs just as covered as they would have been by skin-tight drainpipe jeans but a great deal more free, more empowered. All of this was brought on by the huge, and i mean really huge, yves saint laurent trench coat i found tucked into the folds of the men's section at my local thrift store. Big enough to fit a football team in, it was classic and cool as well as being one of the best bargains i have every found. When i wanted to be a mysterious private detective stalking the back streets of a 1920s chicago the trench was there, winking back at me. When i wanted to be Jane Birkin, all waist length hair and wide eyes the trench was there, singing out to be paired with a stripey breton shirt and black tights.
And it doesn't have to be in good taste. Some of the biggest time travelling thrills have come out of things that, quite frankly, should have been left buried at the bottom of bargain bins. My friend Rachel and I once spent a blissful Saturday jumping around her house in a matching pair of taffeta dresses, one royal blue for her, one sickly purple for me, with huge skirts and scalloped hems. We cranked up the Duran Duran and painted out eyes with turquoise eye shadow she unearthed from a make up palette she must have gotten aged 6 at the chemist.
Or when my sister and I, aged a discovered all my dad's flared bellbottom jeans and cowboy boots (WHAT was he doing in the 70s?) at the bottom of a forgotten cardboard box in my room. Pulling those pants on was like stepping into a world we hardly knew, but that certainly had disco dance moves and flicky feathered hair. Although the most exposure we had to the 70s was from the Charlie's Angels re-runs on TV1, we felt like 2/3s of an all girl crime fighting glamour team.
But the days of inhabiting a different character every time i emerged from the double doors of my tiny room are long behind me. I still have every single one of the pieces I have describe in this post, and i still wear them all very often. But instead of an individual time machine to just one destination I try and embody every one of my favourite eras in every outfit. Who wants to just visit the swinging sixties in London when you could also be shooting pheasant on a country estate in the 30s, pulling on lace fingerless gloves before heading out into the night in the 80s, slinking around in man's pants and taking on all these kinds of masculine powers and rocking a pair of mirrored aviators that wouldn't be out of place in any 70s revival.
I like to be my own personal time travel passport, each item of clothing a stamp to another time, another place, another world of ideas. And a reminder too, of the places you have visited, Paris, London, Moscow, Broome, Venice, Shanghai, Chicago, Vienna, Berlin... 20s, 70s, 40s, 30s, 80s, 50s, 90s, 60s, now. And who knows where in the future. All without ever leaving your home. Not bad, right?
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