By Annabelle Haddaway
Photograph: R Sones / Geograph — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
I have been going to Portobello Road since I was small enough to be carried through it on someone's shoulders, which means I have spent most of my life believing, quite wrongly, that everyone grew up thinking a Saturday morning meant shopping. It was only much later that I understood this to be a rather specific kind of upbringing, and an even more specific kind of addiction.
So I read with great interest, and, I'll admit, a small private smugness, that the vintage crowd has apparently moved on. Ordinary vintage, it seems, is no longer where the real devotion lives. The serious collectors have gone further back, into proper antiquing: Victorian mourning rings, Bakelite necklaces the colour of butterscotch, brooches that have outlived several wars and at least one empire. One American designer, a committed archivist, has spent decades building a collection worthy of a museum, sourcing pieces from precisely the kind of market stalls I grew up getting elbowed out of the way at.
Photograph: Wellcome Library, London / Wellcome Images — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
I find this development enormously satisfying, and not only because it means I can finally claim to have been ahead of a trend for once in my life. It's satisfying because antiquing forces you to engage with an object rather than an era. Vintage, as a word, has become slightly baggy, it can mean anything made before roughly the year you were born, which these days apparently includes 2016 (see: everyone's moodboards this month). Antique asks more of you. It asks you to know what you're looking at, who might have worn it, what it was for. You can't buy your way into that kind of taste. You have to earn it, one wasted Saturday and one over-optimistic haggle at a time.
And here is the part I really want to insist on, because it's the whole of what I believe about dressing well: none of this requires money. A genuinely excellent Bakelite brooch can be had for the price of a coffee and a bit of patience, and it will do more for an outfit, more character, more history, more point of view, than almost anything you could buy new for ten times the price. The idea that elegance is expensive is one of fashion's laziest lies, and it's one that antique markets have always quietly disproved, stall by stall, for anyone willing to actually look.
What I love about this shift, if it's real and not just a passing enthusiasm among people who can afford Fondazione Prada tickets, is that it puts the story back into clothing. A vintage dress is old. An antique brooch has been loved, lost, sold, forgotten and rediscovered, probably several times over, by people whose names you will never know. Wearing it doesn't make you nostalgic. It makes you, briefly, part of an object's very long life.
Go and get lost in a market this weekend. Buy the ugly thing nobody else wants. It's usually the one worth having.