This old thing? It’s from that golden time before life got real

I’ve been flogging my old clothes and accessories online lately. I’ve finally conceded that a wardrobe full of silk shirts, cocktail dresses, and sexy but impractical shoes is wasted on someone who works from home full-time and only leaves the house to walk the dog and go to Breadtop.

All my beautiful things have been pulled out of storage, steamed, hung, and photographed like nervous rescue dogs against a stark white backdrop, waiting for someone to give them a new home. But it’s been slow-going. We’re all a little light on disposable income at the moment, and despite listing my still-tagged Reformation dresses and never-worn Stuart Weitzmann heels for about 30 per cent of their original prices, nobody seems interested in giving a silver lining to my impulse purchases. Except for one thing.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

A handbag I bought when I was a teenager, now somehow old enough to officially be considered vintage. I’d saved every dollar from shifts at the dodgy cash-in-hand restaurant to buy it, then promptly forgot about it. It’s been sitting in its dust bag for the better part of the last two decades. It’s a little plain: a simple brown leather satchel with a sturdy shoulder strap and the brand’s name confidently – even obnoxiously – embossed across the front. It’s ’00s-era style distilled into a silly little bag.

I published its listing with no expectations and woke up to two dozen wish list notifications and half as many inquiries. As my newer, nicer things went ignored and unsold, my boring old bag was snapped up by the following afternoon. I’d priced it too low. I’d misjudged how intriguing a relic of that recently bygone era really was.

My mum told me this would happen. She laughed when I started wearing twee little mod dresses like I invented them. “You’ll see,” she used to say whenever I cringed at the prevalence of corduroy and hairspray in her photos from decades past. “Everything old is eventually new again.”

Don’t tell her I told you this, but … I think she might be right.

There’s something baffling and entirely lovely about scrolling through social media and seeing girls half my age discover trends I already lived through. All the outfits and hairstyles I only recently outgrew, they’re already on their way back. I don’t think it’s because skinny jeans, peplum tops and concealer as lipstick was just a classic look.

We all romanticise the past. Boyfriends who made us miserable at the time look so much better in the unflattering light of yet another bad first date. I reflect on my early 20s with a lot more fondness than reality warrants. It’s that old sleepover question, “If you could live in any other time, where would you go?” and always the same answer, “Anywhere but here.”

So much looks nicer in retrospect. I think back to when I bought that old bag and remember it as an innocent time: social media wasn’t yet the monster it has quickly become, politics seemed less divisive, and nobody was threatening us with the return of low-rise jeans.

My memory fails to acknowledge that the world was on the brink of a devastating financial crisis, that we were paranoid about terrorism at every turn, that the music was garbage, and that your friends were actively encouraged to rank your importance on a public platform.

Under the rosy glasses of nostalgia, everything is lovely. When I shrug into a mod dress, when I swing a vintage bag over my shoulder, when I plonk into my hairdresser’s chair and tell her I want her to turn me into Sharon Tate, reality is irrelevant.

It’s golden-age thinking, or the belief that life was better way back when. Acknowledging that until incredibly recently, life was infinitely more challenging for the vast majority of demographics – well, that’s no fun.

I don’t slip into a pair of corduroys to invent memories of life during the Red Scare; I don’t finger-wave my hair and twirl around in a (replica) flapper dress to lament life under prohibition. It’s a moment of make-believe, reserved just for daydreamer adults. It’s a fantasy, a passing wish to be transported through the years and back to a moment when all the little dissatisfactions and challenges of real life didn’t exist yet.

Borrowing from the past and sprinkling it through the future; a touch of magic in an otherwise mundane and oppressively modern day. Sure, to me, that old handbag is a totem of hard work and frivolous spending – but to someone else, to its new owner, it’s a time machine. It’s hard to put a price on that.

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