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This book explores the meanings and practices of vintage lives. It focuses on the non-mainstream subculture of vintage clothes and lifestyle, specifically that of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and asks how those engaged in the culture place themselves within the gendered and classed contexts of these eras. As a result, it also identifies the tensions involved in these identities connected to a past that offered little gain for women and narrow gender roles for both women and men.
Modern Vintage Homes & Leisure Lives is based on original empirical international data about a group of people who wear vintage clothing all of the time and whose homes are styled entirely, or almost entirely, vintage. It aims to understand the meanings of vintage for them through their daily practices and accrued knowledge. Through interviews and direct observations of vintage events it also explores questions about the acquisition, display and curation of vintage clothes, homes and objects, about glamour and wardrobes, about the history of second-hand markets, and emotional durability and ideas about ghosts, hauntings and spectral remains. It will be of particular interest to students and academics of gender and women's studies, fashion and design, fashion history, cultural studies, the body and embodiment.
List of contents
1. Introduction .- 2. Studying Vintage (Or, What I Did) .- 3. "With Sentiment Still Attached": An Overview of Vintage .- 4. "A Form of Time Travel": Everyday Vintage .- 5. "Search for Hours in a Dark Room": Finding vintage .- 6. Expertise, Knowledge & Inherited Memories .- 7. Dressing Up and 'Wardrobe Moments' .- 8. 'Sensual and Imaginative': Glamour & the Vintage Body .- 9. Virtual & Physical: Vintage Places & Spaces .- 10. Conclusion: "I Like Living with the Past".
About the author
Samantha Holland is Senior Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University, UK, where her work is focused on gender, leisure, popular culture and subcultures.
Report
"The book is a must read for anybody with an interest or involvement in the vintage scene, however, in examining the detail of a subculture through wider themes such as love, emotion, nostalgia and haunting, Holland ensures the book appeals to a wider audience than only those interested in or working on 'vintage'. Holland's attention to methods and methodology also gives this book a varied and widespread appeal. ... this makes for invaluable advice for any future social researcher." (Emma Beckett, Leisure Loisir, May 18, 2020)
