Why I don’t wash my vintage clothes

I’d been wearing my new dress for about ten minutes when I remembered to text my Uncle Bill.

I didn’t necessarily owe him a text, nor do we text regularly. But my dress smelled just like he and my aunt’s old house did back in the nineties—think: perfume and tobacco—which made me realize he and I had gone far too long without a $3.99 breakfast special. So I sent him a text, and we we righted that wrong, and I had my new dress to thank (obviously).

But the thing about this dress is that despite having bought it back in October, it’s old. (Old as balls, to be exact.) It’s a black and white Wednesday Addams number, pushing 40, and is currently hanging out at the tailor’s after The Weeknd concert led to a dancing-induced button pop. And I only washed it because I wanted to impress my tailor.

Disgusting? Sweet baby Jesus, yes. But until I’ve worn a vintage piece myself, I won’t do it. I buy my pieces from (what I suspect and hope is a clean) store, Instagram them for validation, and then hang them up until it’s their time to shine. I want them to hang amongst my existing wardrobe and get used to what it’s like to be crammed and looked over and complained about because I have nothing to wear and everything I own is garbage, including this new thing. I want their confidence to be destroyed just a little bit; their expectations to be low. I want them to feel lucky that I’m even keeping them because I do what I want.

Or, more accurately, I want to retain the little bit of history they have left.

For a long time, I mistook wearing vintage clothes for the belief that I had to look like a Peggy Olson wannabe. I wore only vintage pieces, curled my hair in only vintage styles, and wore the type of makeup that only a vintage person (so: a person) would wear. I was a vintage person (I screamed at the sun) and built a wardrobe consisting solely of vintage dresses, tops, shoes, and bags, accordingly. Then, in a late twenties-induced moment of needing to change every aspect of my life, I got sick of playing dress up, gave away nearly all of my old clothes, and vowed never to look back.

Enter: 30, and the realization that you can just wear whatever you want whenever you want to because getting dressed doesn’t need to be a thing.

In my earlier days of vintage shopping, I restricted most of it to chains like Value Village, which necessitated a laundry excursion almost immediately upon getting home. (Mainly because clothes tend to hang out in piles and on the floor and be tried on by every person, including myself.) But this time, as I rebought and rebuilt, I told myself I was a grown-ass woman and that if I wanted to “invest” in a 1960s wedding-appropriate dress, then I could do it, and how dare anybody stop me.

So I did. All summer long. And I washed them all after I’d worn them once.

There’s something about putting on a dress you know has seen some shit. Sure, it smells like an old closet. True, it’s probably swimming in decades-old spilled drinks (and/or maybe other things). And admittedly, yes, I’ve once bought something that smelled so strongly of mothballs I had to put it outside and reconsider the life I’d chosen. But these things are all part of a dress (or top or whatever’s) history—they’re all glimpses into the parties and nightclubs and living rooms and bedroom floors it’s been in and been on. They’re as close to partying with our grandparents when they were young as most of us will ever get. They’re the last stop on the nostalgia tour, and a keyhole into a whole other world. So, the least we can do is avoid slathering them in Tide and erasing their last bit of retro.

Because of course, at some point, you must give in and become a person who practices sanitary living conditions. It’s one thing to bask in the warmth and memories of a dress that smells like tobacco and perfume, but there’s another to wear something that actively smells (like you). That’s why the joy of a non-washed vintage dress can’t last forever. At some point, you must wash away the remnants of a decade you were never a part of, and bring make it a relic you’ve brought into 2015. At some point, it stops being a time machine and becomes just a dress, defined by your own memories. At some point, you wash the dress and don’t remember to text a family member.

So for the first wear or two, I morph into a romanticized freak who wonders whether her Nana or Grandma or Grandpa-I-Never-Met would recognize the brand of tobacco I’m exuding, or if the second-hand perfume I’ve got on would’ve been defined as fancy or the opposite. I think about what this dress saw or didn’t see but wished it had, or if the lady who owned it before I did would think I was cool or funny or hip and/or worthy of her old clothes. Then, I promise to take care of it (and to pass it on when I find it really has become that wardrobe piece I’ve got no time for) and tell myself that whoever gets my old clothes should be so honoured to smell like Clinique Happy.

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