Abstract
Several attempts have been made recently to understand ‘retro-style’. These have all taken as their starting point that accelerating tendency in the 1980s to ransack history for key items of dress, in a seemingly eclectic and haphazard manner. Some have seen this as part of the current vogue for nostalgia while others have interpreted it as a way of bringing history into an otherwise ahistorical present. This article will suggest that second-hand style or ‘vintage dress’ must be seen within the broader context of post-war subcultural history. It will pay particular attention to the existence of an entrepreneurial infrastructure within these youth cultures and to the opportunities which second-hand style has offered young people, at a time of recession, for participating in the fashion ‘scene’.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those of which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.
Middlemarch, George Eliot
She’s dressed in old European clothes, scraps of brocade, out-of-date old suits, old curtains, odd oddments, old models, moth-eaten old fox furs, old otterskins, that’s her kind of beauty, tattered, chill, plaintive and in exile, everything too big, and yet it looks marvellous. Her clothes are loose, she’s too thin, nothing fits yet it looks marvellous. She’s made in such a way, face and body, that anything that touches her shares immediately and infallibly in her beauty.
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
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Notes and References
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Paddy’s Market in Glasgow, in the early 1970s, offered one of the best examples of absolute social polarity in second-hand shopping.
The Birmingham Ragmarket in the late 1970s provided many similar examples of social diversity in second-hand shopping.
P. Cohen (1979).
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Sally Ann Lasson reviewed Nicholas Coleridge’s The Fashion Conspiracy by poking fun at her own profession which specialises in lines like ‘Paris was awash with frothy femininity’, Observer, 20 March 1988.
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Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
A. Carter (1983).
Ibid.
Ibid.
A. Breton, What is Surrealism?, London, Pluto Press, 1981.
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© 1989 Angela McRobbie
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McRobbie, A. (1989). Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket. In: McRobbie, A. (eds) Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses. Youth Questions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19999-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19999-0_2
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