Please bare with us whilst we pimp out the site. Its business as usual in the CovertCandy community but it will take 1 or 2 days until the vintage  shop is fully operational again.

Please help us out if you find any problems with the site and we’ll be sure to fix things up pronto.

You’re aiming for a fierce look: lots of black leather and mussed hair. Think a feminine Fonz and you’re nearly there; think Chloe Sevigny in her all-in-one leather jumpsuit and you’ve gone way over the line. For a fresh-ish (let’s face it, nothing’s fresh in fashion) take on the look, wear your leather with ultra-girly dresses. For a not so fresh, but still successful, style, wear with skinny jeans, a big T-shirt, ballet pumps or high heels. It’s a quasi-punk aesthetic, but don’t wear it around real punks: you may get beaten up.

Brands like Topshop’s leather jacket is pretty nice, especially with the collar turned up. At £125, it’s not too horrendous a price, either. For something a little more masculine and rock’n'roll, there’s Urban Outfitter’s waxed jacket, which comes in at £169. This would look good with acid-wash jeans and an oversized T-shirt.

The more worn the jacket, the better, so another option is to look at vintage clothing websites. We had a quick look on Rockit’s site and found thisvintage biker jacket for £140. While looking for vintage leathers we came across a blog that we thought deserved a mention. It contains everything you ever wanted to know about the leather jacket, including the mystery behind the D-shaped pocket … Who knew, eh?

Amies is a pretty interesting character. He first opened his Saville Row boutique in 1946, regularly appeared in Vogue, earned a royal appointment to the Queen, designed the 1966 winning England football teams’ suits and (even more impressively to my mind) designed the costumes for Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Hardy Amies brand is synonimous with top quality materials (as I mentioned in The Suit Jacket, wool, tweed and linen are generally more expensive than cotton or polyester mixes) and bespoke tailoring. It is closely associated with vintage clothes of the 1960s – ecchoing the slender frame and sharp shouldered look of the time.

One of these vintage 60s suits would quite frankly, probably cost more than a car. Today, a modern Amies suit would set you back at least £3000.

Hardy Amies remains an iconic and influencial British tailor. Next time you chaps have trouble deciding whether to wear socks with your sandles, I highly recommend you reach for Hardy Amies ABC.

http://www.vogue.co.uk/blogs/the-vogue-blog/articles/090803-pixie-geldof.aspx

The 80s style of leather jacket is similar to the traditional suit jacket I described in an earlier post. The shoulders are generally more pronounced with sleeves wide at the shoulder tapering to the wrist (a tudor-sleeve). Designers at this time experimented a lot with detailing so many vintage 80s jackets are studded or tassled, come in a variety of garish colours or distressed leather. To be honest they also come in varying degrees of hideousness too, but then, thats the wonderful nature of fashion isn’t it. Whats cool one day, is god-awful the next, and vintage the day after that.

For similar jackets to those worn by Pixie for Vogue, check out Covert Candy for some one-of-a-kind goodies.

This relationship between brands and young people has radically changed the speed of fashion cycles. Previously, youth-instigated trends like Teddy Boys, Mods, Hippies, Punks and Grunge all developed over a number of years, becoming fully fledged sub-cultures. Now trends are snapped up by brands and remarketed for the mainstream in a very short period of time. Thus, rendering them no longer ‘cool’, and the whole process starts again.

The residing appeal of collecting vintage clothes is that it is still the most effective way to create a totally independent, unique look. Although the high-street provides much in the way of bland mock-vintage fashion, it’s still possible to source original clothes in charity shops for half the price. High-street brands haven’t quite achieved the monopoly on that front just yet. Infact, better still, the ability to swap clothes as promoted by Covert Candy, sidesteps the capitalist nature of high-street fashion altogether.

Here endeth the long and ramblesome history lesson I’ve doled out over the last few posts. Hopefully thats provided some insight into the development of certain trends over the last fifty years and the current vintage trend.

The term Generation X, although previously alluding to those born after WWII, came to represent the 80s generation of young people who consumed with a sense of ‘ironic detachment’. For independently minded young people, it had got to a point where it was no longer possible to defy mainstream consumerism the way previous generations like the Teddy Boys, Mods and Hippies had done. Those sub-cultures grew from a desire for independence and self-created style. Now however, every new youth movement was picked up, remarketed and sold back to the consumer by major corporate brands. So instead, perhaps as the only method of defiance, young people began consuming with abandon but doing it ‘ironically’.

“…The tentacles of branding [reach] into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment…” (No Logo, 2000)

When Grunge came around in the 90s, the young followers were far more reticent, choosing to adopt vintage clothes and thrift store finds as a means to evade contemporary fashion and consumerism. Their blasé disregard for branding and advertising meant that from a brands perspective, they were an incredibly difficult audience to target.

In Britain, the Football Casuals favoured Armani, Burberry and Ralph Lauren sportswear (later, those wearing knock-off versions would be disdainfully known as Chavs).

In America, Hip- Hop continued to support very specific brands; high-end labels like Louis Vuitton and Rolex that declared the wearers wealth and style. The Hip-Hop endorsement could have a huge impact on the success of a brand. Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, Mercedes-Benz, Krug, Dom Perignon and Cristal champagnes and several other brands all benefited from an association with Hip-Hop culture.

Lil Kim famously photographed by David La Chappelle for Rolling Stone magazine covered in ‘LV’ Louis Vuitton logos, 1999.

Such brands were patronised often without prompting. As an article from USAToday says, “Mercedes-Benz — the most-mentioned brand in last year’s top songs — says the car’s popularity in hip-hop circles certainly didn’t hurt sales growth over the last dozen years…Bentley Motors and Louis Vuitton — also among the most name-checked brands in music — were more reticent on the subject. While some companies may shy away from being associated with a culture often marked by misogyny and violence, it is undeniable that hip-hop wields immeasurable power and influence in business”

(USAToday, April 2006).

In the 1960s, Mods and Rockers took over as the predominant genres. These subcultures also borrowed from a wide source of influences. They too ‘nicked the style of their betters’ [like the Teddy Boys]. Mods favoured sharp Italian tailoring, re-appropriated the militaristic Parker jacket and listened to Jamaican Ska music. Rockers emulated Marlon Brando and James Dean with leather jackets and Levi’s jeans.

Mods

After Mods and Rockers, came Hippies in the 70s, Soulboys, Punks, New Romantics, Skinheads, Football Casuals, Acid-Ravers, Grungers, Hip-Hop and Indie kids, Goths and probably far more besides. Through the decades, these trends continuously set young people apart from the establishment, mixing and borrowing styles from previous genres. The codes of dress developed and changed according to musical preferences, political ideologies and cultural influences of the period. Wearing these clothes signified one’s affiliation with a tribe and the tribes concerns, literally ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’…

Rockers

From the 1950s to the present day, young people have found ways to assert their own style. Though wildly different in appearance, each subculture has demonstrated some common, consistent features; a hybridization of existing styles, a desire to rebel and create a unique identity, and an elitist, tribal attitude.

First up, is a passage I wrote about the Teddy Boys, really the first generation of young British people to create their own unique look by borrowing stylistic elements from the past. Essentially this is what vintage is all about; borrowing past fashions as a way to express one’s individuality. It sidesteps all that homogenous fashion dictated by the highstreet and allows the wearer to look cool, elitist and most crucially of all, unique.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Britain began to enjoy a massive consumer boom. After the rationing and restriction of World War II, people suddenly found themselves equipped with a disposable income and a far more prosperous outlook. The public was enjoying a new sense of freedom and in consumerism, found an exciting way to channel their optimism…

Whilst the mainstream thrived during this period, young people were largely ignored as a potential consumer group. Advertisers simply assumed that young people could be targeted later in life, when they grew up to become far more predictable adult consumers. As social commentator Naomi Klein puts it, “keeping track of the trends and tastes favoured by style-setting youth wasn’t worth the effort” (No Logo, 2000).

So for several decades, young people dictated their own trends, regardless of the sways of mainstream consumerism. This trailblazing period has been referred to as the “youthquake” (Old Clothes, New Looks: Second-Hand Fashion, 2005). In Britain, the first major example of the ‘youthquake’, occurred in the years immediately following the end of World War II. Developed by Northern working-class teenagers as a dramatic escape from the drab and dreary climate of post-war Britain, these youths had slicked back hair, wide-shouldered suit jackets, skinny drainpipe trousers and brothel creeper shoes.

Known as Teddy Boys (and Teddy Girls), they went to great lengths to source particular clothes. As “the original heirs of Beau Brummel” (Loud And Proud, 2008), they took a fastidious interest in the elegant
suits of the Edwardian era (Edward being shortened to Ted and thus, Teddy Boy). Yet they mixed this Edwardian notion of sartorial perfection with a “proudly proletarian” (Loud And Proud, 2008) attitude. In doing so, they created and maintained a sense of exclusivity and elitism, “designed on the street, for the street” (Loud And Proud, 2008). They also created for themselves, perhaps inadvertently, a notoriety and cult-like status. Teenagers had never before experienced the freedom to make their own cultural choices; instead they had obediently adopted the attitudes (and wardrobe) of their parents. The shockingly different Teddy Boy trend, influenced by the emerging American Rock ‘n’ Roll scene, was therefore seen by older generations as a brazen rebellion against authority and decency.

I hope you don’t mind my meanderings down fashion memory lane too much. Next post, I’m back to the 80s, documenting the immergence of hip-hop and how this changed vintage fashion and youth subculture once again.

For one thing, Blur’s unanimously well-received come-back performance at Glastonbury last month brought that interest and nostalgia for 90s Britpop back into the public domain. See 30 seconds of them being amazing here. You could say Take That did something similar with their recent revival but I’m not sure I’d want to credit Gary Barlow and co with starting new trends!

Those Bright Young Things Pixie Geldoff, Alice Dellal and Agyness Deyn have also instigated a bit of 90s vintage revival.

Their punky, rock look typified by black leather, studs, chunky metal jewellery and Dr. Martin boots, take the 80s trend into the early 90s. These are exactly the same components that made up 90s Grunge, a looking almost single-handedly created by trend-setting, era defining Kurt Cobain.

Its certainly a trend to watch out for. The 80s are by no means over, in terms of the current fashion cycle, but a gradual move towards vintage 90s Grunge does seem inevitable. Interestingly, in this weeks Guardian, fashion columnist Jess Carter Morley notes how the Grunge trend is likely to adapt for a modern audience by making it more glamourous – Glamour Grunge or “Glunge”. See her explain the look here.

Hmmm, not sure about the terminology, “Glunge” sounds faintly offensive somehow. Oh well, in a couple of months time we’ll all be wearing it. Watch this space.