Another weekend, another vintage fair! Today I went to the Biscuit Factory, Newcastle, for the fair put on by Britain Does Vintage, and added a few more pieces to my collection…
From left to right, the black material is a wool-blend bolero jacket, the silver floral material is a dress, and the shiny matching things are clip-on earrings. Very pleased with today’s haul!
There have been a few periods in my life where I’ve tried to fit in with the prevailing fashions of the day, but in all honesty, I’ve never really succeeded, and when I look at photos of myself during those periods, I always think I look uncomfortable and not quite right. The style of the ’80s has always felt ‘correct’ to me; it gives me a strong sense of ‘these are what clothes SHOULD look like’, and later fashions just look dowdy and unstylish to my eye. I’m not sure whether I just internalised it really strongly when I first came into the world, or whether I’ve just come to love that aesthetic by chance, but thirty years later it’s still what I’m drawn to, and I think I always will be.
So, my history of being an ’80s fashion throwback, then. I don’t think it counts as being a ‘throwback’ when you’re still in the actual ’80s, but that’s where it began, and clearly my toddlerhood was the best dressed era of my life:
I wore so many different (and AWESOME) outfits during this era. I guess most toddlers go through lots of different clothes, due to the whole rapid body growth thing, but looking at pictures it really seems like in my five short years spent in the ’80s I wore more clothes than in the rest of my life put together.
Shame they couldn’t all have grown with me. Especially the moon ‘n’ stars nightdress in the bottom right corner, my favourite nightdress of all time.
The ’90s, meanwhile, were probably my most difficult decade fashion-wise. Due to a combination of hand-me-downs from family friends, thick curly hair that utterly refused to be browbeaten into the poker-straight trend it was supposed to be following, and a stubborn fully-developed taste that meant I was already gravitating towards the styles of the ’80s, I spent the whole decade doing the awkward ‘dated by quite a few years, but not enough to be retro or vintage yet’ look:
Jeans, especially, I found so awkward – I was drawn to high-rise straight-leg styles, but as the decade went on, they became more low-rise and bootcut – that it put me off them for a long time, and nowadays I don’t own any blue jeans at all. When I reach my target weight, I’ll maybe give them another go.
The ’00s were better (not in general fashion terms – I think the trends of the ’00s were the absolute nadir of fashion in my lifetime so far – but for me personally in terms of style). My teen years, 1998-2004, coincided with the first big wave of ’80s nostalgia in pop culture (The Wedding Singer! The BBC’s I Love The ’80s series! The accompanying CD that I got for Christmas in 2001! Bergerac repeats on BBC2 every day while I was on school exam leave! Websites such as Like Totally ’80s starting up! ’00s indie bands aping ’80s indie bands…now I’m nostalgic for a period of nostalgia. I’ll stop there), and so it was then that I first became conscious that I loved the ’80s so much – that the music was better, the films and TV shows were better, the fashion was better. (I also had a brief flirtation with the early ’70s due to my love of glam rock. You can’t beat a pair of silver glitter platform boots.)
2003 was also the year I became goth. Goth is a wonderful subculture for ’80s throwbacks of a certain style, because the look has basically stayed the same since 1978, and all the clubs play lots of post-punk and synthpop. Utter bliss.
As such, my ’00s look can basically be divided into pre-2004 (Madonna-style fishnet gloves, jelly bracelets and plastic beads from Claire’s Accessories in every shade of primary and neon) and post-2004 (mainly goth, with occasional disastrous forays into mainstream contemporary fashion):
Which brings us to the ’10s. The less said about the first half of the decade, the better – I was uncomfortably overweight and spent most of it hiding away in leggings, baggy t-shirts and hoodies – but now that I’ve lost most of the weight, I’m starting to remember how to have fun with fashion again, hence my recent interest in cultivating a vintage ’80s wardrobe.
I know – from reading stuff by people who are into mid-century vintage – that as time goes on, ’80s vintage stuff won’t always be as readily available and affordable as it is at the moment. As such, I’m making the most of it, with the aim of being able to dress in clothes from my favourite decade for the rest of my life. I hope I’ll be lucky and long-lived enough to be eighty or ninety years out of date one day!
A good vintage fair day today! I went to the Vintage & Street Food Market at the Boiler Shop in Newcastle, put on by Judy’s Affordable Vintage Fairs. I didn’t even notice any street food vendors (probably because of the overriding allure of The Shiny), but I managed to get some of the essential purchases that were on my list for this year:
From left to right: the black velvet material is a knee-length pencil skirt, which I’ve been looking for since I realised I needed to replace my old black pencil skirt with the broken zip (I got that one from Matalan in 2001, so it’s ‘not due me anything’ as my mum always says). The silver shiny material is a lightweight vintage ’80s miniskirt that will look awesome with going-out outfits this year, and the black and blue materials with the fabulously old-fashioned gilt buttons are blouses for the spring and summer. I’m so excited for the weather to get warmer now. Just have to be patient for a few more weeks.
This weekend, I finally got round to starting packing all our stuff up for the move, and immediately remembered that it’s a far bigger job than it seems. Guess I’m going to be spending tomorrow afternoon drawing up a minute-by-minute immovable schedule for the next few weeks, seeing as we’re on a strict timetable in terms of moving out. Geth has suggested getting it done bit by bit in the evenings (and is far more excited about it than I am), so it will get done – it just seems like an impossible mountain at the moment.
So far, I’ve packed about 80% of our books (which has reminded me exactly why I asked for a Kindle for Christmas – ideally I’d never buy another physical book again, but not everything is available in ebook format yet, and sometimes for a vintage/retro lover like me it’s nice to have the original physical versions of old books; still, for reasons of space I would need to have a serious book cull before I bought any more physical ones) and about 60% of my shoes. The shoes take up three holdalls so far and I’m not done yet:
I currently have 87 pairs. I’d have a lot more if I hadn’t forced myself in recent years to be better about chucking them in the bin when they wear out. I’d also have a lot more if I hadn’t been so broke during my most shoe-obsessive years – much as I’m still magnetically drawn to The Shiny, with age has come (a small amount of) wisdom and nowadays I’m a lot stricter with myself about only buying stuff that I know I’ll definitely wear.
Hopefully, this time next week we’ll have got a lot more of the packing done and I won’t feel quite so stressed about it.
I went to my Slimming World group today, as I have every week since the beginning of last February, when I first joined. It’s sort of become second nature, but at the same time a big part of my life.
Pre-SW I had been trying unsuccessfully for eight years to lose weight. The thing I’ve found has been most helpful with SW is the weekly group weigh-in – I find I’m so much more motivated to stay on track when I feel like I’m accountable to other people, and having this weekly appointment has really helped me during difficult periods of my weight loss, at times when, during previous efforts, I would take my eye off the ball and end up regaining everything.
Over Christmas/New Year/my birthday, for instance, I put on five pounds over three weeks. When I went to weigh-in today after a week during which I tried really hard to stick to plan (Dry January is really helping with this), I’d lost four and a half pounds of that weight and am nearly back where I was before Christmas. Just having a support system to keep track of this kind of thing works so much better for me than trying to do everything myself.
Also, it’s great for magpies like me, ’cause you get shiny stickers with every achievement:
Lost another half stone? STICKER. Done enough exercise for a certain number of weeks? STICKER. Lost more weight this week than anyone else in the group? SHINY, SHINY STICKER (not to mention a basket of Slimming World-friendly food). My SW consultant calls it “bling for your book”, and I love bling.
I’ve lost three and a half stone with Slimming World so far – aiming for four and a half stone in total. Hopefully, with all the indulgences of autumn and early winter out of the way, that last stone before target shouldn’t take too much longer!
The first of my online orders from my yearly Christmas/birthday money splurge arrived today: knee high slouch boots from ASOS. They’re a lot shinier than they look on the website, but if you know me, you know that’s no bad thing.
When I told Geth the other day what I’d bought with my Christmas and birthday money (knee high boots! new handbag! nice bracelet! new dressing gown!) he seemed a bit surprised. ‘You buy such grown-up things now. Where are the games?’
I still love games, but I feel like I’ve got enough at the moment (not to mention no time to play them). Not only that, but I don’t really feel like my new fripperies are the least bit grown-up – shiny, sparkly boots are the kind of thing I used to buy back in my teenage years. However, I’ve not bought knee high boots since probably…2007, and there’s a good reason for that. I have ridiculously giant calves, so when I’m even the slightest bit overweight (which I was from 2009 until I started losing the weight with Slimming World last year), knee high boots are an impossibility.
As such, with just over a stone to go till target, these boots are an exciting weight loss milestone. They’re slouchy, so it is kind of cheating – especially as my still-giant-despite-now-being-a-healthy-BMI calves do a very good job of filling the supposed-to-be-slouchy bits – but I’m taking it as a win anyway. Hopefully, when I reach my goal weight, they’ll fit a bit more like they’re supposed to. In the meantime, I’m just going to enjoy sparkling through the dull second half of winter!
I went through my bracelet box this evening. I have several hundred bracelets that I never wear, largely due to a teenage addiction to Claire’s Accessories. SO MANY JELLY BRACELETS. I used to wear them with neon fishnet armwarmers and matching plastic beads, all of which I also still have. My taste in jewellery has always screamed ‘1980s’, though these days it’s a little less early Madonna and a little more OTT power bling. Maturity and all.
Anyway, I’ve organised them into vague colour groupings in the hope that they might actually get worn more often. We’ll see.