Vintage or Just Old? How to Identify Vintage Clothing.
Updated: Jul 31
Within the vintage fashion and clothing resale community, the word “vintage” is thrown around very often as a sort of blanket term for all older items, but its vast usage is often quite inaccurate. It is heavily debated what vintage really is, and the word, through advertising and overall word of mouth, has definitely become muddled in terms of what it truly means. Vintage isn’t a sort of umbrella term for all items older than 20 years old; it is a word used to specify that an item is of a past era.
For starters, vintage is really a broad marketing term used to describe an item that is from an era that isn't current but has occurred within the past 100 years. So, for example, anything from the early 2000s would be considered vintage, as would items from the '80s, '50s, and even around the late '40s. With this, we can see that the word vintage is not so accurate in terms of defining an era; rather, it's a broad term generally applied to items that are from a different time period.
Popular Vintage Fashion Eras
Is It Really Vintage?
With vintage it's all in the labels and the way it's made to identify true vintage items.
Tags
Care instructions: Most pieces before the 1970s did not have any care instructions included in the tags.
Union labels: Often, older clothing will say that it's made by a certain union. Look it up and see if they are still active and/or were active during a past time period.
Font/font size: Vintage pieces will often use fancy script font and will usually be in much larger font as well.
Materials
Single needle stitching: This stitching was very common before the 1990s, before double stitching became the standard.
Metal zippers: Metal zippers were very common pre 1960s/1970s clothing, and most manufacturers now have mainly switched to plastic.
Materials: Most clothing used prior to the 1960s is cotton, wool, silk and rayon.
Another big way to help identify is to reverse search the piece or look up the company on the tag. These are both very helpful ways into figuring out if something is vintage or not if none of the above is present.
The Thrill of the Find
Defining what makes something a vintage item is difficult in a market full of buzzwords and a confusing oversaturation of marketing terms. While the word vintage may always be loosely used in the reselling spaces, there are ways to truly keep yourself informed as a buyer in these spaces. By knowing what eras certain items come from to knowing what methods are used in the creation of said pieces are. In a world full of fast fashion, the history and uniqueness of a piece is what makes it worth hunting for.
Good article. Very interesting