Until very recently vintage shopping tended to be either lifestyle choice or anxiety dream, with little to recommend it to the agnostic or rummage-averse. Sure, somebody’s best friend’s cousin had found that banana-print Chloé top in a cheap heap somewhere on Portobello, but there always seemed to be a mountain of polyester sportswear to climb first.
The true cognoscenti buy vintage at auction, with Bermondsey-based Kerry Taylor foremost on the London scene and beyond — next month she decamps to Paris: for dates, and to register and book viewings, visit kerrytaylorauctions.com. Taylor deals in investment pieces and the iconic, from Vivienne Westwood Harris Tweed crowns to a Judy Blame T-shirt as worn by Kate Moss on the cover of i-D in 1991.
Yet the proliferation of digital resale platforms that have opened up — and simplified — the second-hand market has encouraged a similar shift in the “sourced” economy too. Vintage fashion these days is more curation than clear-out, and the experts behind London’s best boutiques do the trawling so you don’t have to.
Natalie Hartley is a former fashion editor who founded the Portobello boutique Chillie London with the stylist Lydia McNeill. They specialise not in the Fifties lindy hop dresses or Seventies Afghan coats that tend to dominate the rails elsewhere but in streetwear and leather motocross jackets. They upcycle pieces, from fashioning old-school branded bar towels into one-off logo sweatshirts (anyone for Skol?) to splicing retro rugby shirts and football jerseys with a lace trim for full Frankenstein couture, and they also offer rental (chillielondon.com).
“There are a lot of hoarders round here, so we get some really good stuff,” Hartley says. “We’re obsessed with jackets, because they’re the easiest thing to mix into your wardrobe.”
Advertisement
Present finds include an embroidered Eighties Pelle Pelle jacket of the sort the rapper Drake wore recently and a Saint Laurent patchwork number from the same era. It might sound obvious but Hartley’s advice is to shop vintage the way you would anywhere else.
“Don’t go wild and buy something crazy because it’s vintage. Get something you’ll wear again and again — a good black jacket will bolster your confidence in buying second-hand next time you look.”
Down the road is the internationally renowned Rellik on Golborne Road, which has a strong showing of old Margiela and Rick Owens alongside items from the Sixties and Seventies, plus an Eighties Antony Price flight-suit dress that drips with Roxy Music panache. All are strongly sense-tested for being fashion rather than fancy dress (relliklondon.co.uk).
“I live near Portobello,” the writer Pandora Sykes says. “My favourites include 282 for Burberry macs, vintage dress shirts and knee-high boots, Magpie Vintage for reworked upcycled shirts and jackets, and then the spendier, highly curated ones: One Vintage and Found & Vision.”
Across the city, based in Hackney’s hip workspace Netil House, is Baraboux. It is curated by the archivist Sarah Faisal and by appointment only (hour-long slots are bookable through the website). Faisal refers to her stock as a “treasure trove” of Nineties and early Noughties Jean Paul Gaultier, original Alexander McQueen and Tom Ford-era Gucci, which divides roughly into “for sale” and a private collection, available for loan. Prices range from £400 to £1,000 (baraboux.com).
Advertisement
Faisal’s focus is also on pieces that are easy to wear as part of an existing wardrobe rather than the cosplay approach of old, known in the trade as “decades dressing”.
“Our vibe is that everything can be styled and you can create outfits,” she explains. “That’s how vintage works in New York and LA. I think London is just catching up to it.”
On Chelsea Green, Sign of the Times — open since 1976 and run by Antonia Johnstone since 2019 — has a reputation not only as something of an institution but for delivering some of vintage fashion’s biggest hitters: Chanel flapover bags, Fendi Baguettes and Goyard suitcases, with new drops uploaded online daily too. They’re keenly priced but a fraction of first time around — use £895 for a Bottega trenchcoat and £5,000 for a 1989 quilted Chanel bag as your yardstick. The store manager Claudine comes highly recommended too for her expert eye (signofthetimeslondon.com).
For similar guidance in the north of the city, head to “no-nonsense clothing warrior” Dominique Cussen, who has run the consignment store Designs NW3 for more than 30 years off the strength of local Hampstead wardrobes. On the rails you’ll find Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Celine and more, often recognisable from the most haute catwalks (designsnw3.co.uk).
“You can get very lucky if you happen to go after some particularly fabulous woman has just dropped [pieces] off,” says one of her regulars, Francesca O’Neill.
Advertisement
With previous owners respectfully in mind, special mention must also go to Pandora in Knightsbridge (pandoradressagency.com), whose origins map the demographics of its surroundings. In days gone by, when local wives had seasonal clothing allowances at Harrods, they often exchanged their Chanel suits and Lady Diors at the boutique for cold hard cash that might provide them with more autonomy — so that £1,499 Louis Vuitton Speedy is actually the product of female empowerment.
Of course, more recent pieces stretch the definition of “authentic” vintage versus simply second-hand (or “pre-loved”, as the industry more coyly prefers). There is much discussion among sellers as to whether Noughties trend pieces strictly count, so distinctly unspecial do many of them feel.
“There’s a Depop Y2K thing going where people expect a Fila bag for £20,” says Chillie London’s Natalie Hartley. “But for something to be vintage, it has to be authentic, to have been sourced and properly cleaned.”
“There’s more to Noughties fashion than Paris Hilton,” agrees Sarah Faisal of Baraboux. “As time moves on, vintage becomes more casual so it’s able to slip into people’s wardrobes more easily.”
What that means is: fewer ballgowns. La Nausée, based south in Camberwell and by appointment only, is the perfect expression of how one era’s avant garde becomes another’s wardrobe staples. Here is an Aladdin’s cave filled with boundary-pushing designers, from the Japanese (Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe) via the Belgians (Dries Van Noten, Raf Simons) to Margiela, Helmut Lang and Rick Owens, that will slide seamlessly into daily rotation, mostly for less than £600.
Advertisement
The existentialist credentials extend further than its name too (referring to the novel by Sartre) — La Nausée’s in-house philosophers speak for London’s burgeoning vintage scene as a whole when they explain that “by reaching into the depths of each piece, we point out why we feel it has stood the test of time” (la-nausee.com).
