


Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the young hippies of Haight-Ashbury had developed a penchant for the long dresses, lace, and velvet of the Victorian era. When she first started selling this clothing, Love later wrote, “you had to be a little weird or theatrical to buy it, let alone wear it on days other than Halloween.” In New York in 1965, Harriet Love opened Vintage Chic, a boutique that sold what were then known as “antique” garments despite the fact that they were just a few decades old. The “fancy-dress craze,” as it was dubbed in another 1967 Times article, soon took off Stateside. This sartorial revolution began circa 1965, a time when, in the words of a New York Times fashion editorial from 1967, “England’s young began swooping down Portobello Road to buy antique military jackets and delicately handmade Edwardian dresses and, what’s more, wearing them in public.”
#Old fashion art mods#
Then came the mods and the hippies, who shook the dust from these cast-off clothes, combined them into novel outfits, and turned the whole thing into “vintage fashion.” Old clothes-referred to as “used,” “worn,” and “secondhand,” were only for those unfortunate souls who couldn’t afford the freshly made stuff. Having endured the rations and restrictions of World War II, Americans had entered an age of gleeful consumerism and were focused on all things shiny and new. But the meaning of vintage fashion has been changing for the last 50 years-ever since “dressing vintage” became something different than just wearing someone else’s old clothes.īefore the mid-1960s, the idea of wearing an outfit sourced from the wardrobe of a person possibly long dead was unappealing in the extreme. When someone dresses anachronistically, people usually want to know what statement they’re trying to make. Comments from strangers are part of the routine for Gallo, who wears head-to-toe clothing from the 1930s and ’40s on a daily basis.
#Old fashion art movie#
Other times it’s, “What’s with the outfit?” or, “Are you in a movie or something?” It doesn’t faze him, though. Sometimes Gallo gets Frank Sinatra songs crooned in his direction. It was a slight change from the usual reactions. Jeff Gallo, a 51-year-old real estate agent from Brooklyn, was walking through the Staten Island Ferry terminal wearing a vintage trenchcoat, hat, and tie when a group of young police officers started singing the Inspector Gadget theme to him. A vintage store on Haight Street in San Francisco.
