Vintage, pre-loved or just old?

Aah, vintage and retro...

When did second-hand shops become vintage emporia? Or bric-a-brac become kitsch and retro? Sometimes it seems to me that if you label something vintage or retro not only do you lend it an air of coolness that it wouldn’t otherwise have, you can also double it’s price on eBay!

You can't have too many sit on giraffes!

When I was growing up in the sixties, there was real pressure to buy everything new. If you couldn’t afford it, you used Hire Purchase to get the latest TV or sofa, and proudly showed it off to your neighbours. Admittedly many of us now use credit cards and buy now pay later schemes to furnish ourselves with the latest gizmos or home furnishings, but there has been a real shift, especially amongst millennials, to look back to simpler times and embrace vintage and retro in a way that lots of us blue rinsers never have.

My Mum loved a good jumble sale. Many of our clothes, as children, were second-hand and our toys ‘pre-loved’. We had a family tricycle that would be used by one sibling, then repainted to be presented to its next proud owner on their birthday. To be fair I don't think we ever realised, and we loved that trike. It had a boot and everything!

What's not to love?

I never really did embrace the second hand clothes though - especially when I proudly showed off my ‘new' shoes in the playground and said they'd come from a jumble sale. I endured jibes about being dirty and poor for weeks after that. I swore that, if I ever had children, they would always have brand spanking new clothes / toys / everything!

Oh, Beth loves kitsch catties!

How ironic is it, then, that my daughter loves nothing better than rummaging through a charity shop or car boot sale! She seems to have inherited many of my Mum’s genes, including cat collecting, gardening and the love of a bargain! For my Mum, with four young children to clothe and feed, secondhand clothes and toys were a necessity, but for Beth it is different. She loves the quirky things that appear in charity shops - she’s even been known to rescue items from charity shop bins, for goodness sake! She adores anything seventies, and has furnished and accessorised her home accordingly, with an eclectic mix of styles that just seem to work. If something isn't ‘cool’ it doesn't cross her threshold!

'I want everything in this window!'

When Beth comes home, her favourite place to visit is Vintage Mischief, in Beccles. Now, while I have been slightly disparaging about vintage shops, I can honestly say that this one is amazing. It has a real sense of style and some of the things it sells are design classics. 

Design classic candleholders - thank you
Vintage Mischief  (and hubby!)

However, whenever we visit, I do spend lots of my time saying, ‘We had one of those…Nanny had those cups…Brian’s Mum had that ornament.’ If only we’d realised - we could have flooded the market and made a mint! 

This was probably ours!

I was so excited when I saw a water container exactly the same as the one we had in the beach hut, and in that moment I was transported to a happy place, remembering glorious family times.

Such happy times!

So maybe that’s the point of vintage, retro, secondhand, pre-loved. Even if it doesn’t evoke personal memories, it gives you a sense of the past, imagining what an object’s life was like. Harking back to simpler times, where the World didn’t seem so scary (to be fair, it probably was, we just weren’t as connected to it) and summers were always sunny. Yet again, my daughter has got it just about right!

You can't have too many vintage gnomes, either!