Retro red-carpet style is booming business in 2022
Retro red-carpet style is a booming business in 2022, where fashion’s old has become Hollywood gold – often matched by a hefty price tag.
When Julia Roberts accepted her Academy Award for Erin Brokovich in 2001, it was more than just the beauty of her black-and-white Valentino gown that had fashion insiders talking. Unlike other attendees wearing custom attire by of-the-moment designers, Roberts’s dress was a decade old, her retro garb an aberration from the rest of the crowd.
Today, perceptions of vintage fashion are very different. Old fashion is no longer ‘old-fashioned’, and celebrities sporting pre-loved attire has been on the upward for a few years now. One only needs to look to the year’s major red-carpet moments for proof.
At last month’s Fashion Trust Arabia awards in Qatar, supermodel Bella Hadid wore a slinky black gown one may have mistaken for a new designer; nonetheless, it hailed from a 1986 collection by the late Tunisian designer Azzedine Alaïa, making it a decade older than Hadid herself.
At July’s Time 100 Gala, actor Zendaya wore a black and blue taffeta gown from 1998, designed by long-time Cher collaborator Bob Mackie. “I tried this stunning fall 1998 couture gown on a few years ago and it never left [my] dreams,” the Euphoria star wrote to her 156 million Instagram followers. A month prior, Gen-Z superstar Olivia Rodrigo wore black Jean Paul Gaultier, featuring a hint of the designer’s conical bra made famous by Madonna in the early ’90s, at the MTV Movie & TV Awards.
Vintage has also been used to channel pivotal historic moments. Kim Kardashian embodied history – and courted controversy – by wearing Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President’ dress from 1962 at May’s Met Gala.
For the same event, Louis Vuitton ambassadors Emma Stone and HoYeon Jung opted out of brand-new ensembles, instead sporting pre-worn dresses from the maison’s archives.
Supermodel Emily Ratajkowski wore a chainlink Versace outfit from the brand’s ’90s heyday, and South Sudanese-Australian model Adut Akech Bior donned elegant vintage Christian Lacroix, worn backwards for an additional unique spin. Viva la vintage revolution.
Akech Bior’s look was sourced from Shrimpton Couture, the LA boutique filled with hard-to-find vintage fashion that’s favoured by entertainment’s glitterati – Katy Perry, Ariana DeBose and Succession’s Sarah Snook among them.
“I often tell the story of how I bought a very expensive vintage dress online, which was way out of the norm at the time as very few people were selling vintage online 16 or so years ago,” founder and vintage expert Cherie Balch recalls. “It came shoved in an envelope and crumpled and I thought, ‘I could do this better’.”
Identifying a hole in the market for museum-worthy vintage, Balch left her “real job” in 2008 to work on the archive. However, even she’s surprised by recent interest in historic fashion, propelled by the likes of Bella Hadid and the Kardashian-Jenner family.
As for the most sought-after brands, Balch cites Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen – labels with unique heritages and dedicated collectors with money to spend. In some examples, prices of these brands have risen by “hundreds of percentages”.
“[Vintage] does have a place on the red carpet and now, when there is not a vintage moment, people even feel disappointed,” she adds.
Balch’s archive is a carefully curated offering of historic pieces, but if you’ve come across something old and expensive in your wardrobe and are looking to make a mint, selling clothes online is now much easier. Online fashion marketplace Depop has become a one-stop shop for pre-loved clothing and counts over 20 million users. Agustina Panzoni, Depop’s category manager for womenswear, singled out Bella Hadid’s branding power among young customers, even calling it “The Bella Effect”.
“The #ArchiveFashion tag on TikTok has amassed over 14 million views and we have seen a 25 per cent increase of searches on Depop, as people look to express their individuality through one-of-a-kind looks while staying conscious of the environment,” Panzoni adds.
Sydney-based seller Ari Celermajer Kiko De Bono began on Depop before opening her own vintage store, Kiko Vintage, which stocks labels like Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier. She chalks popularity up to these designers’ cult followings, as well as the environmental concerns shared by young Australian customers.
“It’s like, how can I satisfy my creativity, and dress in a way that I feel represents me and speaks to a history of fashion, and also in a way that isn’t going to f--k up the planet?” she says.
The growing vintage market initially presented a conundrum for online shopping destinations, which typically encourage customers to buy brand new. Nonetheless, businesses are cleverly adapting. Take Lauren Santo Domingo, co-founder and chief brand officer of luxury e-commerce site Moda Operandi, which has incorporated vintage ‘trunk shows’ into its offerings from LA archival fashion store Tab Vintage. Shoppers can buy authentic pieces from Vivienne Westwood, Roberto Cavalli and Gucci, delivered as though brand new.
“Everyone always says they want to buy things that are ‘timeless’ – coats, blazers, trenches, trousers – which means one can wear them forever: they never go out of style,” Santo Domingo shares. “But this sort of ‘vintage’ that is of a particular moment in time, is actually the most iconic, and ready for a comeback.”
“Interest in vintage is rising, so it seems like a logical pairing to team up [with Moda Operandi] and provide the best archival vintage collection we could,” Tab Vintage founder Alexis Novak says. She cites a Comme des Garçons piece, displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as one of the vintage items made available to customers, proving the museum-worthy quality of the range.
Buying into exclusivity is one thing, but former Vogue UK fashion editor Bay Garnett is naturally drawn to the nostalgia and escapism old clothing provides. Dubbed the ‘Queen of Thrift’, Garnett is one of the fashion industry’s biggest endorsers of vintage, and says she was confused by fashion’s hunger for newness since the beginning of her career.
“I never really understood fashion editors shooting the same dress all around the world at the same time,” she says. “I always got real pleasure and more of a sense of fun and anarchy using second-hand [clothes] in shoots. Everything being new is not real life, it’s not interesting to me.”
While recognising the influence of vintage on red carpets, Garnett thinks celebrities wearing cast-off clothes in their everyday lives is more influential. She cites model Kendall Jenner and actress Chloë Sevigny, who wear it “as just part of their wardrobe grabbing a coffee. I think it’s more influential when it’s worn in a cooler, more low-key kind of way”.
The consensus from Depop lends itself to this argument; searches for ‘Y2K’ on the platform have risen 62 per cent in the past month, with ‘cargo skirt’ and ‘cargo pants’ seeing a 560 per cent and 215 per cent year-on-year increase. Whether a couture dress or cargo pants, what was once old has certainly become new again.
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