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| Richard Avedon for Vogue (1955) |
If old is the new 'new', what if you’re heading towards
antique status yourself? Can you ever be too
old to wear vintage? On innocently asking this of the woman behind Jean Cronin Vintage,
Looking Our Best (LOB) has been taken to task. “I disagree totally with
categorising - it’s actually ageist.” It
wasn’t quite handbags (second-hand) at dawn when your blogger met up with the effortlessly stylish Jean Cronin for some grown-up fashion expertise, and LOB concedes that the blog could sometimes be mistaken as a dreaded ‘Dress
Your Age’ edict. But still the feeling
persists among those of us heading towards our sell-by date that if you fall for a beautiful length of old lace to wear, you could end
up looking like Miss Havisham. Not so, it's all about confidence, says Jean, and knowing what suits us is one of
the advantages that comes with age. That is what should guide when buying
something new, not whether it’s vintage or modern, she says. “You wouldn’t walk into Debenhams and buy a polka
dot dress with huge underskirt and frills just because it has a 1950s style,”
she argues. “ You buy what you know suits your shape, and the same goes if it’s
vintage.”
The very word ‘vintage’ has
become something of a catch-all phrase, but for Jean, it simply means
beautifully tailored clothes from the past, professionally finished, and in
wonderfully tactile fabrics such as pure silk, cashmere and tweed. As a young art college
graduate back in the late 70s, she co-founded Xanadu, the tiny Dandelion Market
second-hand shop that blossomed into an Art Deco-style boutique on Dublin's
Drury Street. Three decades on, she
remains the go-to collector for beautiful vintage clothes, whether you are an
art director on a film, or simply someone looking for a special one-off. Jean has
also designed her own clothing and accessories range, and runs a designated
boutique in The Loft Market, (pictured right) blending old with contemporary. And that’s the key to making vintage work, whatever your
age, she says.
“You never wear all vintage – you would just look like you
are auditioning for a play in the local parish hall. Mixing modern with
something older is how the look becomes individual. But I think there is confusion out there as to what constitutes vintage. A lot of stores
are selling 80s clothes as vintage. It’s a look that’s hard to wear and doesn’t
really doesn’t suit anyone over 30.” For
us grown-ups long past our 30s, little black dresses and tailored jackets
from bygone decades have never gone out of style. A classic
designer label will undoubtedly influence a purchase, and you can still find
the odd gem (Jean sold Yves Saint Laurent and Dior pieces at a recent vintage fair).
The same goes for accessories, especially
handbags with beautifully aged leather, and that could probably tell a good
story. Costume jewellery offers something unique too. Pearls – which don’t have
to be real – are worth treasuring, she says. Clip-on earrings (pictured left) give a great
period look, and are often more beautifully designed than pierced earrings.
She
is enthusiastic about wearing brooches, although LOB feels you can end up looking like
your grand aunt. “You wear them in a different way – high up on a collar, on a dress
with a low-cut back, pinned to a belt, or on to a bag.
It’s the same with silk scarves, which are
beautiful in their own right. In the past, women wore them under the neckline
of coats, as much to save on dry cleaning as anything else. We wear them over garments now. ” Vintage shoes are in a different category
again, and Jean acknowledges that many people are not keen on stepping into the
previously worn. “I don’t have any such reservations, because vintage shoes are
so beautifully made. They usually have leather soles – something you don’t get
with modern shoes. I have original brogues from the l950s made from kid
leather.
I wear them with jeans in the summer. In fact, it you look at modern
shoes, they are generally reproductions of styles past. ” You can check out Jean's take on vintage, along with a host of other exhibitors, this Sunday at the Spring 2013 Vintage Fashion & Decor Fair. So if you are a certain vintage, and do find that special treasure, the trick is, yes, do it again, but do it differently.
Among LOB's other happy hunting vintage Dublin stores are:
and A Store Is Born
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