A very vintage vibe

Fashion should never be purely about what’s come before, but it’s difficult not to love a piece of clothing with a story behind it. I don’t want to sound too salacious, but there’s always a romance to the idea that someone might have conducted an illicit affair in your floral tea dress, or met the Queen in your Versace twinset – or perhaps they might have even (gulp) popped their clogs in your vintage suede clogs. But whether your style is PJ Harvey or Princess Anne, there’s something of the “British Bird” about trawling through racks of higgledy-piggledy 1960s Biba and 2008 New Look.

St Andrews is hardly a vintage paradise, but the arrival of the Very Vintage Fashion Fayre in Venue One last Saturday was a godsend for those who, like me, long for something stylish and distinctive without a kick to the student loan.  

At last year’s Vintage Fayre, I managed to discover a fabulous, seemingly homemade tea dress (I like to call it bespoke), which hung on my picture rail like a work of art all summer. This time around, the stalls were just as full of one-off treasures: a medieval style red maxi dress complete with brilliant bell sleeves, a beautiful Gunne Sax prairie style wedding dress and a real leopard skin trench coat were among the hundreds of tempting pieces on sale.

Sister Vintage and their, uh, brother stall, Mister Vintage, offered a dressing-up-box’s worth of 80s shoulder pads and 50s silk scarves, and enough plaid and faded band t-shirts to clothe an indie group from pub gigs to a third stint in rehab. The lovely ladies from Rummage very nearly managed to talk me into buying myself the tailcoat I’d seen hanging outside their shop on South Street and have lusted over ever since my arrival back in Scotland. It didn’t fit, but I hope that some modern Marlene Dietrich reading this feels inspired to buy it and wear it in Tesco, thus rendering herself my Fife fashion icon.

I was particularly taken with the vintage glasses stall run by the fabulously named Dundee company, Spex Pistols. The temptation to blow £100 on a pair of prescription horn-rimmed glasses and spend the rest of the month eating Supernoodles was overwhelming – despite my 20/20 vision. After five minutes of pouting at myself in the mirror and dreaming about my new life as a sexy librarian (clothes maketh the man), I went away with some free chocolate and the promise that if I changed my mind about prioritising food over fashion, we’d be able to sort something out.

Buying vintage clothes takes us back to a time when flares came without the laughter and track and wiggle skirts weren’t part of a Mad Men fad in Banana Republic. The fair brought a taste of Portobello to St Andrews for one day only, and until Christmas, I suppose I’m back to infrequent jaunts to Edinburgh and excavations of the burial ground of Halloween costumes that is Sue Ryder’s vintage section. Scary.

Images ©Kenna Bisset