Part of the appeal of such pieces lies in their scarcity. Unlike your typical ‘90s or ‘00s Goodwill finds, there is, unsurprisingly, only so much pre-1930s clothing still in circulation. For the average shopper, these garments are quite difficult to buy in bulk, making them resistant both to instant gratification and overconsumption disguised as a thrift shopping haul. An old Edwardian top on Facebook Marketplace, a 1920s cloche hat at a flea market: it takes digging, negotiating, and post-hunt hand sanitizer, but the payoff and satisfaction of slowed-down shopping lasts lifetimes.
Persistence holds value and warrants a fundamental shift in how the buyer thinks of a purchase: not as a one-time occasion but an experience with build-up, followed by lots of tending. Like personal style, finding antiques does not happen overnight (unless you get especially lucky, which in that case, good for you) as many have been tucked away in armoires as family heirlooms or folded beneath layers of clothes in roadside antique malls across the country. “Antiques aren’t inherently accessible…It takes patience to sift through today’s overwhelming consumer landscape, and often, the willingness to learn how to sew, mend, and properly care for fragile textiles,” Minton notes.
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There’s a sort of quest for authenticity that underlies the vintage-crazed’s and archiveheads’ motives, followed by that sense of accomplishment for finding something seemingly one-of-a-kind. When it’s around 100 years old, it feels foreign, almost alien in a way no contemporary fast fashion or 25-year-old vintage clothing could evoke. “People want the real deal. You may not be able to wear antiques every day, but they have an embedded story in them, which I think many are looking for these days,” adds Kacie Lambert, 33, who owns the Chicago boutique Everything. More a gallery than your typical store, Everything houses just that: an array of artist-made, upcycled, and antique garments like opera pieces and turn-of-the-century slips. Lambert recalls observing the shopping mall boom as a child and just how important it was for stores to physically appeal to their audiences, an element of shopping lost to e-commerce. To Lambert, antique pop-ups and flea markets — in all their chaos and hustling — feed that in-person experience so often lacking in the mainstream today.
