Hello lovely,
There is a particular sort of excitement that comes from finding something suspiciously fabulous on a crowded charity shop rail.
Perhaps it’s a dress with an impossibly good print or a beautifully tailored coat. It could be a blouse with tiny covered buttons and a label that you haven’t seen before. You pluck it from between two ordinary modern pieces and suddenly you’re wondering if you’ve found something genuinely old.
This is usually when I turn it inside out.
The glamorous outside of vintage clothing understandably gets most of the attention, but the inside is where the interesting stuff is hiding. You might see an old metal zip, a generous hem or a line of hand stitching. It could also be a manufacturer whose name disappeared decades ago. Sometimes you even find evidence that somebody altered the waist, moved the buttons or carefully repaired a seam.
Those details are far more useful for dating your treasure than a retro looking print.
If you want to know how to identify vintage clothing, the real trick is learning to read an item as a collection of clues. Labels and zips help. Fabric choices and construction help even more. But few details can give you an exact date on their own.
And that’s all part of the fun – you’re being a fashion detective!
First, what do we mean by vintage?
The word vintage has become very elastic online. A 1950s cocktail dress can be vintage, but so can a polyester blouse someone brought in the 2010 when they were in sixth form.
The Vintage Fashion Guild uses twenty years as the minimum age for pieces sold as vintage by its members, although there is no single definition governing every single seller or marketplace.
That essentially means that pieces from the early 2000s have now entered vintage territory, which might be alarming if you’re like me and brought them the first time around.
Emotionally, I’m 100% not ready. Historically, here we are.
It’s also worth separating vintage from vintage inspired.
Your new dress can have a sweetheart neckline, covered buttons and a gloriously swishy circle skirt without having spent a single day in the 1950s. I love a good reproduction and wear vintage inspired clothing all the time. The problem only comes when something newly made is being presented, and priced as an original period piece.
Fortunately for us though babe, clothing tends to leave clues.
Start with the whole garment
Before you start analysing labels, start off by looking at the silhouette.
Every decade contained far more variety than the simplified fashion history we tend to remember, but proportion can give you a useful starting point.
A fluid 1930s evening gown behaves very differently on the body from a sharply waisted 1950s dress. A little 1960s shift has a different attitude again. By the 1970s, you could find narrow knits, huge sleeves, prairie dresses, flares, and slinky evening clothing happily occupying the same decade.
This is where looking at original fashion becomes incredibly useful.
Spend time with museum collections, old catalogues, photographs, advertisements and sewing patterns and gradually you’ll start to see decades are more than costumes.
The 1950s weren’t just polka dots and petticoats and the 1940s weren’t exclusively tea dresses and victory rolls. And everyone in the 1970s didn’t wake up wearing brown polyester and enormous flares.
Real wardrobes were more complicated. People (like today) kept favourite clothes for years. Older women didn’t just automatically adopt every single youth trend. Home dressmakers reused patterns and manufacturers carried successful styles from one season to the next.
So I tend to use silhouette first to form a first suspicion rather than announce my verdict. Then I go looking for more evidence.
Now turn it inside out
This is where things get good.
Modern brands can recreate vintage silhouettes remarkably well. They can reproduce prints, decorative buckles and buttons and additions like lace and velvet collars.
The construction often tells you more.
Look at the seams first.
Are the raw edges pinked, bound, overlocked or left unfinished? Is there hand sewing around the hem or lining? Does the inside look mass manufactured or is there something individual about it?
One common piece of vintage folklore says that overlocked seams mean a garment must be modern.
They don’t.
Overlock machines existed way earlier than many people realise and serging was being used for seam finishing from the 1920s onwards.
This is why I’m always a little wary of those little social media graphics that promise you can date clothing from one feature.
Fashion history isn’t that polite hun.
Instead, look at the construction as a whole.
A commercially produced department store dress from the 1950s may be beautifully and consistently finished. A home sewn dress from the 1970s could be gloriously chaotic inside.
Both will be genuine vintage.
The label is a clue, not a certificate
Finding an old clothing label is always exciting, particularly when you discover it belonged to a forgotten boutique, department store or regional manufacturer.
And labels can be really useful when dating your clothing.
The Vintage Fashion Guild’s Label Resource is one of my favourite places to start because it documents historical labels alongside information about manufacturers, designers and changes in branding.
Look closely at the typography and logo rather than just searching the company name.
As with today, brands changed their labels.
A company that existed from the 1940s through to the 1980s may have gone through several redesigns, so knowing that the business itself is old does not automatically age your garment.
I usually photograph the label and search the exact wording.
If there is an address, include that too.
Retail addresses can change. Company names change. “Ltd” appears and disappears. Logos get modernised. Occasionally you can narrow an item’s age surprisingly well from those tiny details.
And don’t just assume that the label will be sitting neatly beneath the neckline. Older labels can turn up in side seams, waistbands and near hems too. Sometimes finding one needs a little bit of rummaging.
British vintage has some wonderful giveaways
For anyone hunting vintage clothing in Britain, certain labels can be particularly revealing. One of the most recognisable is CC41, the Utility mark associated with Britain’s wartime Utility clothing scheme. Clothing rationing was introduced in Britain in 1941. Utility clothing followed that year, with production standardised and fabrics controlled as part of the wider wartime effort to conserve labour and materials.
Finding a CC41 mark is therefore rather more useful than finding a generic old looking clothing label.
It anchors the garment to a very particular period in British fashion history.
Another small symbol worth recognising is the Woolmark. The familiar Woolmark logo was introduced in 1964, which means if you spot it, the item couldn’t have been made before that date. Notice what that tells us – it gives us an earliest possible date. It doesn’t tell us that the skirt is from 1964.
That distinction is very important when dating vintage. Some of the most important clues tell you what a garment cannot be.
Then there is the zip
Ah, vintage zips. I love them. But they can also be to blame for a huge amount of misdating.
A metal zip feels old, so I get it. It’s so tempting to see one and immediately think 1940s or 1950s. Unfortunately for all of you style detectives, metal zips didn’t just vanish when the 1960s arrived.
Placement is often more interesting that material when dating your clothing.
Metal zips started to appear in women’s dresses from the late 1930s. Side seam zips are particularly associated with garments from the late 1930s through to the 1960s. Centre back zips did appear earlier but became more common through the later 1950s and 1960s, and were widespread by the 1970s. Plastic coil zips existed earlier too, although they weren’t commonly used in clothing until around the early 1960s.
Picture if you will a dress, with a nipped waist, full skirt, side metal zip, deep hem and an older woven label. Interesting…
Now all of those details are beginning to agree with each other. That’s exactly what you want.
The zip pull can offer you another avenue of research too. Talon, Lightening and Éclair are among the manufacturers you might encounter on older clothing.
Just resist the temptation to make the zip responsible for dating the entire dress.
Old clothes were often changed
One of the reasons why rigid vintage dating rules fall apart is because people actually wore these clothes. That means they repaired them, shortened them and probably let the hem down again. They would take in the waist and let them back out. Buttons were replaced, zippers broke and linings wore through. Sleeves were altered and removed completely when fashion changed.
I find those alterations fascinating.
Look for old stitch lines, mismatched thread, extra holes around buttons or small sections where the fabric is slightly darker because it used to be hidden in a hem.
A newer zip doesn’t mean that an item has been incorrectly dated. It may mean that someone replaced the original.
This is particularly important with items from periods when clothing was expected to be maintained and adapted.
During the Second World War for example, Britain’s Make Do and Mend culture actively encouraged people to repair, alter and reuse existing clothes while new clothing was rationed. Imperial War Museum has examples ranging from altered garments to clothing created from repurposed materials.
The history survives in the garments.
A slightly uneven alteration doesn’t bother me – in fact it’s quite the opposite sometimes. It means somebody thought the dress was worth keeping.
Fabric has its own timeline
The more vintage clothing you handle, the more you start noticing the fabric before you even glance at the label.
There is a certain feel to old rayon. A weight to vintage wool. A rustle to certain 1960s and 1970s synthetics that’s almost impossible to describe until you’ve handled them.
Fabric names can also help you to establish an earliest possible date.
Rayon became an important twentieth century dressmaking fibre. Nylon reached consumers in stockings in 1940 before expanding into other clothing after the Second World War. Dacron polyester began to appear in clothing in the 1950s, while elastane was developed at the end of the decade and became more widespread later.
That’s another reason why I wouldn’t dismiss something because it’s made with polyester.
Fabric should make sense alongside the proposed date. If somebody is selling you an untouched 1930s dress containing a fibre that wasn’t commercially available or used for clothing, then the math ain’t mathing babes.
Care labels can be surprisingly revealing
Care labels are deeply uninteresting (to me). But, they are useful.
In the United States, permanently attached care labels became compulsory in 1972. European care symbol systems began developing during the late 1950s and came into use the following decade. That means a label can sometimes help you rule out an earlier date.
A supposedly 1940s dress with a long modern care label covered in washing symbols, several languages and contemporary fibre information might not be from the 1940s after all.
Of course, you do need to consider where the garment was made.
British, American, French, Italian and other manufacturers didn’t all follow identical labelling rules.
And sometimes, labels get removed. Which brings us to one of the biggest vintage myths.
No label doesn’t mean homemade
An unlabelled dress can absolutely be homemade. There were generations of extremely skilled home dressmakers, and original sewing patterns show us just how ambitious home sewing could be.
But the absence of a label doesn’t prove it.
Labels were removed or fell off. Garments were altered and restyled. Some manufacturers labelled clothing differently to what we’re use to today.
If I suspect something is homemade, I look at its construction.
Maybe you’ll see that the seam allowances vary slightly. There could be visible pattern markings inside or the finishing could be different to the norm. There might be no manufacturer information anywhere, despite a very thorough search.
On the flip side, just because something is beautifully made, doesn’t mean it was commercially made.
Some home sewn vintage clothing is exquisitely finished. Your grandmother may well have been a better seamstress than half of the shops currently on the high street.
American vintage has its own language
American garments also come with their own particularly useful clues.
You may see ILGWU labels, which refers to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. The design of this label changed over time as the union and its affiliations changed. For example, an ILGWU label mentioning AFL CIO must postdate the 1955 merger of those organisations, while a distinctive red, white and blue version was introduced in 1974.
Then there are RN numbers on American textiles.
These Registered Identification Numbers relate to businesses rather than individual garments, so they should not be treated like manufacturing dates. They can help you identify the company responsible for a piece, which provides another line of research.
This sort of clue is really useful when buying online because you can ask a seller for a close photograph of every label before you click that “buy now” button.
Buttons lie
Well, perhaps “lie” is a bit unfair. The truth is that buttons are unreliable witnesses.
They can be incredibly beautiful on older clothing, from glass and mother of pearl to early plastics, covered buttons and elaborate metal designs.
But they are also really easy to replace.
A previous owner might have changed the buttons on their jacket in 1965. Another might have changed them again in 1982. A vintage seller might have even added period buttons recently to improve a garment.
My tip here is to take a look at the thread. Do all the buttons look like they were attached at the same time? Can you spot any old stitch marks underneath? Does one button look subtly different? Sometimes the clues are sitting right there.
Once again though, I prefer this slightly messy version of vintage history. Perfect untouched items are wonderful, but a coat with forty years of love and little modifications tells me a much richer story.
Don’t let the size label frighten you
You find a gorgeous dress. You love the dress. Then you see the size label.
Ignore it.
Well, don’t completely ignore it, but don’t treat it as an equivalent to your modern clothing size.
Sizing changed enormously across manufacturers, countries and decades. Even two vintage garments showing the same nominal size may have completely different measurements. When I shop for vintage clothing, actual measurements of the clothing matter more to me.
For fitted clothing I want to know the bust, waist and hip measurements, along with the length. Shoulders and sleeves matter for jackets and blouses too.
And don’t forget to leave room for yourself to exist inside the garment.
If your bust measures 38 inches and the dress measures 38 inches, technically those numbers match. Whether you can sit down, move, breathe and eat dessert is another matter entirely.
Remember, vintage clothing is meant to be enjoyable to wear.
Be especially careful if the clothing looks too obviously “vintage”
You might think that I’ve finally gone coocoo, but bear with me…
Sometimes the easiest pieces to misdate are the ones covered in every visual shorthand we associate with a particular decade.
Polka dots, cherries, sailor collars, huge 1950s skirts. Modern inspired brands have been producing these clothes for decades. And don’t get me wrong, many of them are very good.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with owning reproduction vintage. My wardrobe would be considerably smaller, and not as good, without vintage inspired clothing.
But a reproduction dress shouldn’t acquire thirty or forty years of imaginary history because someone decides to list it online as “true vintage”.
Search for unfamiliar brands, check labels carefully and look for contemporary websites, modern care info and current manufacturing details.
If something feels suspiciously pristine, that doesn’t means it’s modern either. Deadstock and beautifully preserved vintage do exist.
Just keep gathering your clues Sherlock.
About that word “Deadstock”
I approach the word “deadstock” with a tiny raised eyebrow. Genuine deadstock refers to old inventory that remained unsold or unused and fabulous examples are out there.
Original shop tags, period packaging, manufacturer information and groups of identical unworn pieces all help to support that history.
But an immaculate vintage dress is not automatically deadstock.
Perhaps it was purchased, but no one actually wore it. Perhaps it was stored carefully for a “special occasion”. (You know how I feel about that, just wear it and make every day special!) Perhaps Auntie Joan brought the wrong size in 1968 and refused to admit defeat for the next fifty years.
Unless there is evidence, “unworn vintage” may be a more sensible description. Specific language matters, particularly when sellers are asking for premium prices.
What I look for when buying online
Buying online is convenient, but it removes one of your greatest dating advantages. You can’t touch anything. That means that photographs and videos (if you’re lucky) need to do the heavy lifting.
I want to see the front and back naturally, but I also want to see the nitty gritty pictures.
Show me all of the labels and inside the seams. Snap a pic of the zip and show me the hem. Photograph the tiny mark below one arm that is barely visible until someone points it out.
A good vintage listing should tell you about the condition, alterations and measurements rather than hiding behind that wonderfully vague phrase “good vintage condition”.
The Vintage Fashion Guild’s own code asks sellers to include dating information, fabric details where known, construction features, measurements that clear notes about repairs, alterations and flaws.
That seems a very reasonable standard to me.
The best way to learn? Handle more vintage
There is only so much a guide can teach you – and if you got this far, you get a gold star.
Go and look at clothes.
Vintage fairs are brilliant for this. So are charity shops, textile museums and exhibitions, costume collections and gloriously chaotic second hand shops where nobody is entirely sure what they have.
Pick things up and feel the fabric. Take a look at the seams. Notice the weight of older tailoring. Study labels even when you have no intention of making a purchase.
Over time, you learn and develop and instinct for it.
I sometimes pick something up now and immediately think “this feels seventies”.
But I still check for my clues. Instinct is very useful, but evidence is better.
Let the garment tell you its story
For me, part of the joy of buying vintage clothing is identifying how old it is and imagining it’s history. Of course I do care if it’s a fabulous piece, that’s usually why I picked it up in the first place.