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For me as a writer, vintage clothing has a special value: there are stories locked in the seams, memories packed in the covers, held between the panels and hidden in the rooms. Sometimes the previous owner left you evidence: a shopping list in a pocket, a coffee stain or a recording from a happy night’s dance. Imperfection is an indelible detail of the beauty of second-hand clothing. A tear or missing key can tell the story of an item’s authenticity, and sometimes an imperfection explains how the item found its way to you, who fixed it and loved it again. It’s true of people too – our marks and scars tell the stories of where we’ve been, where we’ve fallen and how we’ve healed.
For thousands of years, people have worn each other’s hands, and because it was too expensive to buy new things, they bought and sold clothes. My grandmother sewed dresses for my mother to wear to school, then my aunt wore them, and then they were passed down to a cousin. But at some point this hand-down tradition stopped being so common. Buying new clothes was a way of showing self-respect; The only people who wore vintage clothes were poor or strange or both.
But counter-cultures took a crack at fashion: miners in 1960s San Francisco pieced together discarded and donated clothes as part of their radical anti-capitalist lifestyle. Then the London punks took it further, mixing old clothes into a new aesthetic to make people look like survivors after a trip to hell and back. The new look entered mainstream culture through television and movies. After that they invaded Goth and Grange. In 1993, as a teenager, I saw Kurt Cobain sing live on a sheer green sweater, and my world changed forever. Cobain represents anti-conformity, strength over honest vulnerability, and an aesthetic that can be corrupted by its own anger and passion and still be beautiful. Grunge spoke to the nihilist artist in my slightly broken teenage heart. Everyone I grew up in wore clothes from the same shop: Umbro football shorts, canvas trainers. I wasn’t a normal person, and I was wearing vintage clothes to prove that.
Most of my collection comes from a vintage clothing store in Cambridge, Massachusetts called The Garment District. In the 90’s you can still find 40’s tees and 70’s polyester print shirts selling for a dollar a pound at Mountain Wear. I get an adrenaline rush when I sit in a pile and go through the clothes, pull out a shiny sleeve and find a patchwork dress, or a perfect pair of Levi’s 501’s from a distressed denim dig with graffiti. On knees, reading “Class of ’76.” Back then, I didn’t think about the ethics of buying wine. I’ve been buying vintage to challenge the status quo. And dressing in vintage was a visual art; I saw it as a fashion collage. Sorting through piles in the clothing district, I wasn’t looking for quality basics that I could wear year after year—I was looking for a single item that looked like I wanted it.
Author Otessa Moshfegh.
Dressed in vintage clothing, it made me feel at home and connected to people who had passed through this place where my family were newcomers. I was born in Boston and was the first in my family to call the USA home. My ancestors are Croatian and Persian, but New England will always feel rooted in my bones. I was dressing the people who lived before me, weaving their stories into my own.
The addition of vintage clothing to everyday wear seems to be a recent phenomenon, born of privilege and nostalgia as much as necessity, but a different necessity these days. Affordable clothing is everywhere, and it’s toxic to the environment. Over its life cycle, a pair of jeans emits the equivalent CO₂ of driving a car about 69 miles. And if you try to throw away that pair of jeans, it can take up to a year to fully biodegrade – and that’s only if they’re 100 percent cotton. Synthetic fibers make matters worse. Getting dressed in the morning has never been so morally charged – and people will judge you for it. Head to toe fast fashion looks good for just one day. So what? Recycling your clothes is one way to clear your conscience.
What a vintage-phile like me loves most is seeing them pull new fashion icons from the past. I imagine Kaia Gerber sporting her supermodel mom Cindy Crawford’s classic Alaia leather jacket, which makes the ’90s fresh and chic. Zendaya wore a black and white pleated number from Valentino’s Spring 1992 collection on the red carpet, lifting the look from Linda Evangelista and making it all her own, nothing less. And for the day, we’ve got Emma Chamberlain’s “Giant Savings Trips,” where she explains how to reread pieces from the 1990s and 1990s.
And while I think it’s important to clean out and review the laundry from time to time, there are some things in my closet that I’ll never part with: the blue hooded sweater I wore when I met my husband, the dress my mom wore when she got married. She lived in Brussels in the 1970s, my late brother’s “I Climbed the Great Wall of China” T-shirt.
I feel like a time traveler when I wear any kind of wine. The texture and weight of the garment on my body, the way it moves around me, the shapes it makes, all transport me back, like a memory, of me doing what I feel like, or someone else entirely.
When I sat down to write the show notes for Proenza Schouler’s Fall 2022 runway collection, I couldn’t let go of the idea of fashion moving through time, reflecting the values and wonders of the ages. Talking to designers Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez about how they conceived their collection was like talking to a novelist or filmmaker. You build the world, think about the characters and how they move; Like a wardrobe for an unborn woman, they look at the past and renew it to say something else. Where are we going? And how does the clothes we wear reflect who we want to be when we get there?”
A few months later, at the fall ready-to-wear shows, I walked the runway for Maryam Nasir Zadeh, an Iranian-American designer I admire. Apart from the nerves and sudden lack of clue how to move my legs, I felt completely new on the catwalk. No one has ever seen or worn these clothes. I was introducing them to the world for the first time. There was something magical about that. On a normal day, if my clothes don’t look good, they shake or ride up, it’s because there’s something wrong with me, my shape, my size. But being a future fashion model, I did not feel such insecurity. I didn’t need to be ashamed of being the weirdo that I was. Mary didn’t want me to wear any makeup. Light hair. I felt stripped and exposed, and beautifully myself. No clothes, no vines, were there to identify me.
Lapvona By Otessa Moshfegh is out now.
This article will appear in the September 2022 issue of ELLE.
Otessa Moshfegh is a novelist from New England. EileenHer debut novel, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. My vacation and vacation year And Death in her handsHer second and third novels were New York Times Best sellers. She is also the author of a collection of short stories Home to another world and fiction, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
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