In Praise of Vintage Fashionistas (With Reference to the Case of Anastasiia Grigoruk)

Miss Anastasiia Grigoruk

Vintage fashion model

I.

Vintage fashion is an attempt to harvest the glamour of the past by wearing the clothes, accessories, hairstyles and makeup from a previous era, sometimes creating an entirely new look by mixing and matching styles and periods. Nietzsche might describe the latter chaos of styles as a form of barbarism, but as someone with a punk background this doesn't greatly trouble me.

That is to say, whilst I want people to invest care in their sartorial ensembles, I don't demand absolute authenticity and I'm happy to see non-vintage elements added, including retro designs that merely imitate the originals.  

II.

I'm particularly smitten with some of the vintage fashionistas who go to extraordinary lengths to create a stylish and sovereign model of agency and find a new mode of relating to contemporary reality and the passing of time; of capturing something of the eternal feminine that is not beyond the present but still immanent within it.

Those puritans who criticise these young women for being vacuous and conceited and sneer at their constant posting on social media, are simply not Greek enough to understand what their passion for artifice and things of the surface tells us.

Such moralists think it's just a silly game of dressing up and recycling appearances; a nostalgic exchange of real history for hopeless fantasy. But the revolt into vintage style, like other forms of dandyism, signifies something philosophically important; for it transgresses the principle of utility and seriousness to which the grey-beards would keep the world tied and affirms instead gay insouciance.

III.

What's more, to be successful within the terms set by such an elaborately mannered ethic requires admirable self-discipline; thus one might even suggest there's an element of stoicism within the world of vintage fashion. Again, the idea of building and maintaining a lifestyle is often derided, but people who think it's easy obviously haven’t tried it.

In order to become who she is, a girl like Anastasiia Grigoruk has to spend many long hours before her mirror and display an almost fetishistic obsession with the smallest of details. The adding of style to one's nature is much more demanding than accepting a pre-given way of being. It demands sustained activity and knowledge of what Foucault terms the arts of existence and techniques of self:

"those intentional and voluntary actions by which [individuals] not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria."


IV.

Finally, I'd like to close by commenting on the notion of community within the world of vintage fashion; for it strikes me that amongst those who devote themselves to such there's a good deal of shared kindness and mutual support. 

If, first and foremost, vintage fashionistas are driven by a will to create a singular existence, they nevertheless seem to instinctively understand: (i) this is not something that can be carried out in isolation - that giving birth to the dancing star of the self is not an experiment in solitude, but a true social practice; and (ii) that when a line of narcissistic flight collapses into the black hole of solipsism, this is a sign of failure. For being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, as Heidegger says. 


See: Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 10-11.

For a sister post to this one on the fabulous French vintage fashion model Miss Alba Banana, click here.