“Vintage” Moved from Wine to Cars and Clothes

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lily Whitney calling from San Diego, California.

Well, welcome, Lily. What can we do for you?

My question is about the word vintage.

So I am a collector of vintage clothing, and I was wondering when that word shifted from wineries and vineyards over to just meaning old things.

Good.

Great.

Yeah, tell us about your passion for vintage clothing.

I have for a long time admired the fashions of the 20th century, and I have attended lots of vintage fashion expositions and hunted through many thrift stores, and I am just a connoisseur of old clothing.

So when you talk about the fashions of the 20th century, do you mean the clothes that Martha and I used to wear?

I was going to say, you might have bought some of mine.

Well, I’ve recently acquired a pair of go-go boots, which I am proud of.

Oh, they’re nice.

Yeah, those aren’t mine.

Yeah.

I never had go-go boots.

I wanted them.

And so how old are you?

If you don’t mind me asking.

I am 14.

14.

Okay.

Solid question, by the way.

Very solid.

The nice thing about that is that you understood the two parts of it.

One, that it used to come from exclusively mean wineries and wines, and now that it’s moved on to something else.

But I would hesitate to say that vintage now only means old, because what you’ve described to us is having taste and discretion.

And you are going through the styles of the past, and you’re finding things that still have flair and character and sophistication.

There’s some residue left behind of an era where things were made differently.

But they were still beautiful and they could be transformed into something new.

So it’s not just old, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

And so does your family drink a lot of wine?

Is that how you knew the wine connection?

No, my mother and I were discussing it and she did tell me about that it originally was the year that a wine was made.

Yeah.

And even further back, the vintage was just simply the volume and the type of wine that was made.

It was just like the wine that had been vented, that is the vintage with no particular judgment as to quality.

And then later, of course, when they started to talk about a particular vintage because wine can keep for a while and particular years or vineyards or terroirs start to have a particular cachet, then the term really started to acquire this notion that we have still with wine, where a good vintage just indicates a wine that is special, it’s sophisticated, and people with taste, people with culture are going to recognize that.

And then by the early 1900s, we start to see it being branched out and vintage being used for other things that are judged in a similar way, where it’s known to have style or quality.

And the first use that I can find of vintage being used outside of wine at any great frequency is with automobiles.

Yeah, and it’s interesting, too.

I mean, we should mention that the word vintage itself goes back to the old Latin word for wine.

You know, it’s like vino in Spanish and vineyard in English.

It has to do with wine originally.

But like a lot of things that happen in English, words are transformed.

They’re moved from one domain to another.

And in this case, yeah, so by the early 19-teens, you can see it pop up where it’s both wine and cars.

The particular quote I saw in one journal in 1919, it was about a man who made a business out of selling used automobiles.

And it says, to begin with, he and his chauffeur knew a vintage car as a bon vivant knows wines.

And I think that we really still see very much with vintage.

It’s this idea that you’re only going to appreciate a good vintage automobile or good vintage wine if you’ve got class and style and flair and all the good things that come from being the upper crust of society.

Lily, is that your sense of the word or do you have more of a sense of just used clothing, secondhand clothing?

Well, I do know there is a connotation of flair and some je ne sais quoi about vintage clothing that you wouldn’t say, oh, that’s old.

You’d say, this is a vintage item, and that would make it special.

So more of a sense of craft and artistry and aesthetics.

Because you could go plunder a closet that hadn’t been opened since the 1960s, and not everything in there is going to meet your definition of vintage, right?

Right.

Yeah, some of it is just going to immediately leap out and you go, this is gorgeous.

This has got something.

If you want to know more about vintage clothing and its history, there’s a really great multi-volume work called the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion from 2005.

And they have several pages on the transformation of the idea of secondhand clothes to the idea of vintage clothes and talks about kind of before World War I, secondhand clothes that had all these different social connotations.

And vintage doesn’t really start to happen as a trend until the 1960s.

After World War II, the increase in certain kinds of manufacturing, the increase in surplus income, everyone having a little more money to spend, it’s really, really interesting.

That’s the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion.

You might be able to find extracts of it online.

I’ll check it out then.

All right.

Well, Lily, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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