I love Italian label Vivetta. Love as in would love to own their collections in their entirety. They sure know how to please my desire to dress like a three year-old (collars! sailor outfits! pretty dresses! cat motifs!). My highlights of their current collection are the red bow dress (it’s red, it has a bow = perfection), the baby blue pleat dress with white collar (I’ll look like a really cool nurse) and the white lace dress with black sleeves and heart detail (my boobage will look amazing). Time to play the lottery I think!

I really love Finnish shoe designer Minna Parikka – there’s always something I love in each collection, be it a shoe, bag or gloves. Her take on classic designs and retro styles always has me charmed.

I took a day off from the day job yesterday to get my hair cut and list some more places on The Vintage Guide. As always Claire of Claire Hair did a fab job and giving me a sharp crop, plus I love sitting in her living room, chatting vintage over a cup of tea.

Afterwards I was off to Leonard Street to check out new vintage cafe-cum-shop Crimson Heart. There’s a little tea room downstairs where you can have coffee and home-made cake. I was really won over my the eclectic decor – kitsch Fifties paintings and a disco ball? I’m sold! Upstairs owner Mia sells vintage home deco, mostly midcentury, from tea sets to old hair dryers. She has an excellent eye for interesting details and prices are excellent given its trendy location. I bought a little orange Sixties lamp – perfect for my bed-side table.

Desparate Scousewives

Amidst all the spray tans, vajazzling and hair extensions, vintage-loving women tend to stand out with an aesthetic that evokes glamour, individuality and femininity. Could the vintage girl then be a new form of feminism, an antithesis to the blingtastic, porn-star style that influences female identity at the moment? 

I don’t quite know how it happened or when but far too many women around me seem to want to look like a porn actress these days. Or why else would they wax off their pubes, slather themselves in Fakebake and state Page Three Girl in their career goals? There is something about the passivity of this particular idea of femininity – there to be stared at, cum onto – that I find deeply infuriating. It’s just sad that we’re all meant to look like little plastic sex dolls – fake eyelashes, fake hair, fake tan, fake boobs.

To my relief (no really, it is!) there is a great big social group of women out there who don’t buy into this image – the vintage girls. Although the vintage scene is splintered into smaller subfractions of particular decades, musical styles, dances and activities, the one thing all these vintage-loving women have in common is their embrace of an altogether different femininity, one that’s individual, one that harks back to a time when glamour was exotic and empowering.

Although these girls look back at past style icons they don’t become carbon copies of their idols, they mix and match their style, they construct their own image, they don’t simply buy into a ready-made identity. And often they take inspiration from those pioneers of feminism, the smoking, partying 1920s garconnes, the sports-playing, car-driving women of the 1930s, the home front workers of the war years, the 1950s office workers slowly edging their way into the work place and the sexually liberated dollybirds of the 1960s.

some of my vintage-loving friends

image: www.aspreyphotography.co.uk

It’s no co-incidence either I think, that there is such a wide variety of body shapes – from really slim to really curvaceous – in the vintage scene as well as a much broader range of age from teenagers to women in their Fifties than any other social scene I have come across. It’s like the vintage girl has somehow managed to embrace her body rather than radically reshape it into the accepted norm, and I am convinced that wearing vintage is playing a part in this, because you don’t shop for it by size but by fit. I myself have gradually weaned myself of the idea that I am a certain size (I never really was anyways, given the vanity sizing issue) – instead I go by my measurements. If a vintage dress happens to not fit me I simply put it back, I don’t see it as a comment on me being too big, it doesn’t give me that feeling of horror when I couldn’t fit into my size on the highstreet, where it felt like every too-small dress was the entire clothing industry laughing at my failure to be a size ten with perfect breasts.

There is no doubt to me that ‘opting out’ of the whole female fakery is in essence a feminist stance, perhaps not knowingly so, but feminist none the less. What do you think – is vintage a new form of feminism?

I’ve added another vintage site to my growing, errr, ‘portfolio’. I have taken over as publisher and editor-in-chief of QueensOfVintage.com – an online magazine about all things vintage, which I used to edit a few years ago.

I absolutely love this video tutorial by the brilliant Lisa Eldridge. She is using unopened, original Biba products to create this amazing deco inspired look.

I’m so looking forward to upcoming BBC4 film We’ll Take Manhattan (showing January 26) about Sixties model Jean Shrimpton. The Shrimp is played by one of my favourite red heads, Karen Gillan, who looks rather like her.

All images via Daily Mail

More than anything, this shoot makes me want to get more 50s home furnishings.

I’m currently reading a book about Biba (review to follow soon) which has some detailed images of Biba clothes – phwoar! I basically want the lot, which is frankly impossible.

But I am thinking about having some remade and my number one choice at the moment is this fab red wool dress with art deco buttons and belt.

I’m going to a wedding in early March for which I’ll be wearing a fab vintage hat the Doc got me for Christmas, and this dress would go so well, especially as I’d have the skirt slightly longer to just below the knee. Decisions, decisions…

Yesterday the Doc and I went to the new Affordable Vintage Fair at Spitalfields Market. It’s a great fair with lots of stalls selling vintage clothes and home deco. Best of all it’s free to get in and under a roof so it’s just perfect for a rainy Saturday.

Then we went on to Issy’s Milky Way, a new 50s style shake place in Islington’s Camden Passage I wanted to review for the Vintage Guide. Only recently we were talking about how London really needs a 50s place that’s not American but more British and Issy’s is exactly that. The cheese toasties and shakes were delicious too!

I bought a little 60s hat at the fair and a really fab Carin Wester dress (at the Urban Outfitters sale, a bargain a £20).