This was a letter posted on my friends website

Serioulsly,
I joined the goup to have this conversation... what is so cool about vintage? I'm all about being yourself, and I don't know how being like people used to be has anything to do with being yourself? How can one define themselves by emulating what others have done in the past... Maybe I'm crazy,but I think starting something new is what it is all about... If vintage was where it's at, why did people stop doing it? I hate fads, and I don't get bringing old ones back!

This may be a bit of a buzz kill, but hey, I'm all about originality and vintage, just like retro, is by definition... not original.

To me learning from the past and incorporating what others have done into something new and different is the way to go! Feel free to disagree, it's why I commented!

Cheers,
Graeme

MY REPLY TO GRAEME:

Graeme,
your assumption about originality is based on a false premise. Things ;style; trends do not occur in a vacume. Further rarely is any item manufactured in the modern industrial age trully unique say in the way great great grandma might produce a peice of folk art. Reification (the loss of the "original") and the industrial process eliminated "originality" as as a reprocussion of the postmodernist age we are left with homages, bricollages and intertextualities in place of "originality". That being said designers today mostly and simply borrow from styles in the past, mixing up the metaphors to create an "aura" of originality. The past i.e. vintage clothing represent the eons of developement of clothing based on utility and ceremony, lets say tribalism meets practicallism...you can hunt in it and look cool and scary in it. So people into vintage clothing are more about "originality" or perhaps past context far more then those "style makers" today. They honour the traditions of tribalism, unionism, industrialism and folk artism that seem so irrellevant in a word where clothes are produced for the cheapest dollar, feel free to see my thoughts and feeling on this in my group on VINTAGE LEATHER JACKETS or on my blog

Comments

Popular Posts