Paisley, floral, sequins, mothballs, musk and sweat: walking into a vintage store seems to always be accompanied by exposing myself to a cacophony of outdated sights and unpleasant smells. Yet every time I go, these shops seem to be filled with keeners like me – all of us plugging our noses and averting our eyes all the while hunting for the perfect find. This makes me wonder: what can that single raspy yet, melodic voice of a particular vintage garment sing out to us to make wading through an entire store worth while?
Vancouver and UBC are constantly filled with twentysomethings sporting an item resembling an era gone by, but knockoffs don’t cut it for me. Today, unscented and unstained vintage-flavored new clothes can be bought almost anywhere – but those pieces can’t indulge my imagination for these eras as well as if these garments perhaps smelled a little fouler, or looked a bit tackier… Call me crazy, but what’s vintage unless it sparks some imagination?
Connecting the material and imagined brings back memories of a piece of artwork in my family’s home that depicts Bratislava, the city my family emigrated from. The piece contains a realistic portrayal of the historical main square, with fantastical characters from Slovakian myths that are recognizable to me thanks to the quirky books and films of my childhood.
The value of Slovakia’s watermen, witches and giant owls is in how they are associated with certain stories that contain moral and cautionary messages. But it’s the characters’ placement in real historical spaces that touch me, because now those places always seem to remind me of the constant potential for the dangers of those myths to creep into my life. It seems that the ancient and tangible somehow have a power to breathe life and relevance into otherwise obscure myths.
Photo credit here.
Similarly, heirlooms – meaning objects, not just buildings – inspire our imaginations and precipitate our emotions. Only in their cases they allow us to fantasize about a continuous family identity and a snowballing wisdom. If vintage garments have this same power, then I wonder, where do the stories that they tells us come from?