Everyone "cool" has a story about their vintage find at a thrift store, flea market or online website. Vintage clothing has a bunch of reasons to be worn, and they all make sense to a casual eye, much like vintage clothing itself.
To be sure, vintage clothing can come from a thrift shop like Goodwill, but not everything at Goodwill is vintage. By the same token, most everything from the 1990s would be considered "grunge" and outside the realm of a pure vintage lens. On top of all this, vintage clothing can be inexpensive, but it also has the potential to break the bank.
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Vintage style heralds from Americana from the 1920s to the 1980s. These decades were the prime of America, and the styles that come out of them are things that the collegiate demographic aspires to: successful, carefree and expansive.
We buy these items piecemeal and place them into our lives in a controlled way, so that our items are curated and placed on a shelf as though it were a museum.
By patching these items onto our personalities like denim jacket patches, we allow them to control who we are.
Urban Outfitters, the much maligned and yet sometimes celebrated retailer, is jumping on this trend under the umbrella "Urban Renewal."
If you thought the commercialization of historical awareness was not bad, take a look at Urban Outfitters's attempt to resell everything from scrunchies to overalls.
Ebay's fashion expertise sums it up to: "Wearing vintage assures that you'll stand out from the masses in a trendsetting outfit that accentuates your individuality!"
This is a hopeful refrain that keeps people pressing at the doors of vintage shops everywhere.
Now, I couldn't write a column about vintage and, by extension, thrift shopping without mentioning Macklemore's anthem "Thrift Shop."
This extremely popular song lends itself to critique the fashion-industrial complex that plagues the image of most people.
The rap reappropriates the thrift shop vibe of openness with an aura that's used to show off and one-up other people. Here we are again, with an underground trend forced into the class-conscious mainstream.
Besides the obvious commercial reasoning against conspicuous vintage, there are some people who might want you to believe that you're doing something good by buying that bomber jacket or boots from the 1970s.
Vintage enthusiasts love to idealize the recent American past. From the first manuscript of "On the Road" to the times when it was appropriate to wear a "Cosby sweater."
However, these times were not better or worse than the present, and our collective memory attempts to whitewash the past to a time when music was louder and people were more fashionable.
People must refrain from attaching intense and emotional connections to their clothing because it ends in the clothing owning them — not the other way around.
There is a place where clothing can be used to express yourself, but it stops looking good when it's a tightly-wound response to trying to be fashionable, weird and ahead of the trends.
Describe your favorite vintage sweater to Peter at Peter.Northfelt@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @peternorthfelt
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