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Vintage shops can go and fuck themselves.
Other | Wednesday 19th November 2014 | Grace
This year I attended my first ever London Fashion Week. Connor had extra tickets to some shows, I sort of sometimes think maybe I should give that whole fashion thing a go, and maybe I’d get some free shit.
I agreed and then thought FUCK…what the fuck am I going to wear??!! My wardrobe is a mismatched collection of charity shop shit, eBay, Primark and clothes from my parents’ teenage years.
I sort of decided to just dress like I might maybe dress for a night out; I was wearing American Apparel jeans which I bought from eBay, a jacket that I bought in a charity shop which I cut the shoulder pads out of, and a pair of shoes I bought on eBay. I usually get a lot of comments on this jacket (nearly always bad. One man even asked me once if I was in fancy dress as an 80′s pop star and then ran away laughing when I said no) but YOLOO FASHUN WEEK BITCHEZ. Here’s a picture of me looking supa kool n trendy n like a hunchback:
So we arrive at fashun week and see lots of fashunable things and fashunable people. (I’m saying ‘fashun’ because most of the fucking people there were posers who didn’t even see any shows, but just wanted to get photographed and reblogged on Tumblr.)
Connor and I wandered around for a bit, and then some woman ran over to me. She stopped me and was babbling about my jacket and if it was vintage and if yes where was it from and blah blah. I told her it wasn’t because I bought it in a charity shop, and she said “yeah that’s the same thing!”
………….. you fucking what mate. I was speechless. I was laughing and sort of slightly uncomfortable, and she wrote down where everything I was wearing came from, and then asked if she could photograph me. Even more baffled by how the situation was unfolding, she took some pictures and said I’d be on their Instagram blah blah blah.
She tells us she’s from a vintage shop in London that I won’t name (Beyond Retro), and I guess she’s expecting me to cream my pants now I know a super kool fashun vintage shop took a photo of me that will probably never come off that SD card.
In reality, the whole situation made me feel very awkward and I was absolutely baffled by her claim that charity shop = vintage.
(Some shitty vintage shop)
I’ve been buying clothes in charity shops since I was about 16, mostly because I’m tight. I HATE spending a lot of money on clothes, I rarely go shopping - when I do it takes a lot for me to part with more than a tenner - and I can never find anything I like. Plus I love the fact that the money I am parting with is going to a good cause.
I still feel a bit confused about it, so I took to Google and learnt that “Vintage clothing is a generic term for garments originating from a previous era”. All that made me think about is dickheads who use the expression “vintage garms”. Even typing that made me want to claw my face off. I would rather shit in my hands and clap than genuinely use that expression.
If you don’t know what that’s from, I strongly suggest you watch this video:
I would never buy anything from a ‘Vintage Shop’ because I think they are so unbelievably over priced. If I ever found anything in there that was reasonably priced, I would buy it, but that’s never happened, so I haven’t. I always sort of thought that things where vintage if you bought them specifically from a vintage shop??! Like they have some special magic vintage powder that they sprinkle on the clothes and ta dah!
So basically, what this woman taught me is you can call anything vintage if it’s pre-owned. So what the fuck is the difference between ‘vintage’ and ‘charity’ shops?? It’s simply the fact that you have the novelty of saying vintage shop. It’s kind of like you are paying for the label, not for the item, like Beyond Retro or Rokit or whatever. But the fact that this woman is going around saying that charity shop clothes COUNT as vintage means she is basically shitting all over her own job?! I was curious about how they source their clothes so I checked on the Beyond Retro website and they state; “All of the starry, vintage products are bought directly or indirectly from charitable organisations.”
HOW IN FUCK'S NAME IS THAT ACCEPTABLE????
They are literally admitting on the Internet that they buy clothes from charity shops, spruce them up, sell them for twice the price and then DON’T give any of the money back to charity. That is fucking disgusting. They’re making double the profit that the charity shop would make AND giving it a pretentious vintage tag to make it more desirable. Fucking hell.
It’s like some kind of backwards fucked up Robin Hood! Taking from the poor, making money off the poor and then not giving any of it back!
(Much vintage, very dickhead)
So I urge you, next time you step into a vintage shop, reconsider. You’re getting mugged off by a company selling you shit you THINK you want because they call it vintage and it’s kool now and mainstream and whatever. (Wait? Is it mainstream? Or hipster? Isn’t hipster mainstream now? You’ve probably not heard of hipster, but I heard about it ages ago). And not only are you getting mugged off, the charity shop they bought from are getting fucked over too. So put down the tie-dye t-shirt of an American football team you’ve never heard of, head to a charity shop, get yourself five things for the price of that one t-shirt, and know that the money you spent will go towards some good in the world.
P.S I didn’t get any good free shit at Fashion Week. Just some “beautiful water” which tasted like arse.
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