Anachronistic Dressing, Retro and Vintage
Scholars employ different terms to describe ol
d clothing with a look that is ana
-
chronistic compared to current styles. Angela McRobbie (1988) refers to wearing
recognizable decades
-old looks as “anachronistic dressing.” This is a useful
phrase that I also occasionally employ to highlight when press r
eferences to vin-
tage mean wearing used
-clothing that noticeably displays iconic styles of the past.
Anachronistic dressing can be achieved with actual antique clothing or with
new clothing made to look old. While press references to “retro” could encompass
genuinely old garments and new reproductions of old looks, retro usually refers to
the latter. Heike Jenss (2005: 179) characterizes retro as, “an all
-encompassing
catchword” that involves:
...the construction of past images and historical looks which can b
e achieved with
original objects as well as with new ones that look historic. It uses the potential of
dress as a cultural signal of time and an important component of cultural memory,
historic consciousness and imagery.
The ability of “retro” to encompass
both old and new has led some to characterize
“retrochic” as inauthentic and messy, blurring clear distinctions between past and
present (Samuel 1994).
In a sense, the term “vintage” represents a semantic attempt to claim authen-
ticity for genuinely old cl
othing and objects, distinguishing them from “retro”
reproductions, as well as serving as a marker of distinction from contemporary
secondhand clothes. When specifically referring to genuine decades
-old clothing,
the term “vintage” tends to be preferred in
the United States. “Vintage” is a con-
cept that has undergone a shift in meaning when it was applied to clothing. In
origin, the term refers to “wine age,” the specific year and place of origin, such as
with “Bordeaux wine of a 1965 vintage.” When “vintage
” was first applied as a
descriptor of clothing in the 1960s, it was employed in a way that suggested new
clothing was akin to a particularly good year for grapes, something that must be
purchased now as an investment (see analysis below). However, “vintag
e” quickly
morphed into an abstract category describing old clothing generally, and no longer
necessarily referred to purchasing new clothes as an investment in the future.
DeLong, Heinemann and Reiley (2005: 23) describe the abstract category vintage