The Booming Market of Vintage Curation
How Brands Took Direct Control of the Vintage Market
While vintage shopping you may have an idea of exactly what you’re looking for, but as you sift through the many racks, you experience a rollercoaster of emotions between ‘what a unique piece’ to ‘I’ve always wanted this but it’s not in my size.’ Vintage shopping (real vintage, not vintage-inspired) is a consumer experience that is incredibly hard to replicate. So why are more brands suddenly selling vintage pieces directly? Wouldn’t this take the fun out of the experience? Curation in any market is a premium service. To be able to distill a wide range of products down to a handful that have the greatest commercial and cultural value while dealing with the inherent scarcity of sourcing vintage items requires intimate market understanding and time. Through attentive styling and experiential marketing, brands are selling us a lifestyle through their clothing, so adding vintage pieces to complement their core offerings make a brand even more of an immersive ecosystem. The brands that have launched successful vintage collections in tandem with their mainline offerings have a clear design language, strong brand ethos, and usually fit a style archetype.
Brands started to curate vintage collections largely as a strategy to differentiate their brick & mortar experience. RRL and Todd Snyder, both very popular with the Americana menswear crowd, have elaborate retail spaces with a very keen design eye featuring postmodern art and mid century modern furniture. In their New York City stores, these brands brought in wristwatch and antique experts to curate a collection of old western memorabilia, coveted luxury watches like 60s Omega Speedmasters and Rolex Submariners, and unique jewelry. The entire experience evokes the early days of Manhattan menswear. In a similar omni-channel strategy, Rowing Blazers, the cult new-age prep brand that started as a book recounting vintage blazers, has a section on their website for Vintage & Home where they tap industry friends like watch expert Eric Wind to find iconic prep memorabilia for sale. Their vintage watch curation served as a precursor for their own vintage inspired watch collaboration with Seiko - an amalgamation of the very vintage watches they curated. This reveals an incredibly powerful product strategy. A vintage collection can pay homage to your brand heritage, but it can dually plant seeds for future design.
Celebrating their 40th anniversary, J.Crew, the era-defining prep brand, is releasing extremely limited vintage runs of their iconic 1990s pieces. Teased on their Instagram and released online, J.Crew dropped an extremely limited size run of barn jackets and roll neck sweaters actually from the 1990s and sourced by J.Crew in single size quantities. As they push further back into brick and mortar, their flagship location on New York’s Bowery Avenue houses several extremely limited vintage pieces. Hearing there were under 7 jackets available in store, I ran to the location and fortunately picked up a mustard color barn coat actually from 1990. The sales associate very astutely explained the jacket’s provenance and design influence to me. I left feeling like an expert on the piece and understood where it fits in their larger design evolution.
Sometimes design evolution isn’t as explicit, so a vintage collection can also be an array of vintage items that inspired the creation of the brand. Take Aime Leon Dore’s bi-annual vintage installment called ‘Leon Dore.’ Through this collection, Aime sources and sells relics of old New York, mementos of founder Teddy Santis’ Greek upbringing, and pieces that were initially ‘old money’ staples but have now been recontextualized for the modern consumer. Much like what you would see on a moodboard, you have a vintage NYC Marathon sweater next to a Patek Phillipe Calatrava next to a book on Frank Lloyd Wright and it effortlessly makes sense. Vintage collections are a strong way to convey a level of authenticity, but if it feels forced or inauthentic, the customer will easily know.
Some brands take curation to an entirely new level by repurposing vintage garments. This often involves taking deadstock fabrics and details from vintage pieces to create an entirely new piece. Bode is the poster child of vintage repurposing, taking vintage blankets and quilts to create one of a kind garments. One of the many reasons Bode is so successful is that they combine heritage looks with modern silhouettes. Very few brands can bridge modern and vintage like that. Seldom talked about but one of my favorite vintage displays, KITH has a line of vintage repurposed tees that are only available through the store. These are vintage tees that the team has directly sourced, occasionally modified, and stamped the KITH box logo over the graphic. The subjects range from the New York Yankees to the Olympics to College tees. While shopping a few weeks ago, I found a Syracuse University KITH co-branded tee shirt. Being upstate with copious nostalgia for Syracuse, this wasn’t like finding an average 90’s tee shirt in a thrift store. This was all my world’s colliding - the city I live in and the city I’m from featuring the logo of one of my favorite brands, all in one garment that is a one-of-a-kind piece. If brands can replicate this feeling through a vintage collection, the future of vintage is about to be very exciting.
