The trend of “vintage,” especially as it applies to men’s fashion and goods, has been around for a number of years now. However, recently it seems as though consumer culture is being inundated and downright saturated with the vintage ethos. So much so that vintage no longer appears to carry the same heft or to elicit the same feeling as it once did. It’s not enough anymore to simply call something vintage–everyone does that–so new terms like “heritage collection,” or “lineage” have begun to supplant it’s usage. It has also become fashionable for men mostly around my age (I’m 34 years old) to market themselves as connoisseurs of such things–modern vintage curators, they might pretentiously refer to themselves as–as a way to define themselves and to craft and hone their “personal brand.” The tipping point for me was when I saw an ad for a well-known tortilla chip company marketing their new “artisanal” tortilla chips. Really? Surely this trend has run its course.
Who among us doesn’t like to escape the the present to the world of nostalgia every now and then? I find it interesting that it has become such a large market. Perhaps it’s the times we’re living in. Remember the good old 90s when everything was going great? People don’t have jobs, the economy is in the tank, banks are failing, credit is hard to come by even with a spotless record. It’s not really a mystery as to why people have turned so nostalgic in the past few years. But what happens when culture tires of the fad of nostalgia, vintage, heritage, and all the rest? What’s next? What happens to all those folks who’ve defined themselves with this trend?
As I was thinking about this and trying to make some sense of it, I began reading Luc Sante’s 1992 book Low Life. In the preface, I found this wonderful quote about nostalgia:
This word can be generally defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy, safety, and community—qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one’s birth. Recently it has become a category of trade, under which are marketed the knickknacks and ephemera of past decades; in this function it encompasses connoisseurship, fetishism, fashion cycles, and social history, and makes them all equally base coin.
In the mid/late-90s when I was an undergraduate student there was an extremely eccentric bass player in the jazz ensemble I played with. He was the guy, who on a long bus trip to Boston popped in a VHS tape of Meet the Feebles for all to enjoy. He was also the guy, who although 60s fashion was enjoying a renaissance would wear his best 80s parachute pants complete with multiple zippers on an almost daily basis. When challenged by the band’s drummer about his fashion sense, he responded firmly and with great conviction that fashion was cyclical and he was, indeed, ahead of fashion, adding that in 10 years we’d all be paying $200 for pants like his. It’s a funny episode that has stuck with me and now looking back on it nearly 15 years later, I am struck by how right he was. He could have been bullshitting, but knowing the guy, I don’t think he was.
Perhaps the vintage/heritage/lineage rage will subside soon as culture moves on to the next thing. And maybe, like fashion, this too is cyclical and will return in a different iteration sometime in the future. In the meantime, I think I’ll skip the artisanal chips.
