Second-hand, up-cycled, pre-loved, old, vintage…call it what you like, I love it!
Both my fashion and my home echoes a vintage style and I really enjoy tracking down pieces, old and new, to wear or add to a room. I love how clothes from the 50s celebrate an hourglass shape and how bright and pretty a lot of the fabrics and prints are. At the weekends, I am always on the look-out for vintage tableware and other items to use in the kitchen.
Anyway, I digress…you can see I am fan of the style of days gone by!
To continue with this post, I now have to admit a dirty secret to you…one of my guilty pleasures, along with buying nail varnish, eating cheese and drinking red wine, is the Daily Mail Showbiz page! Yes, I know there are much better news sources available but I cannot resist some trashy celeb gossip and it was during my daily sneak at this website that I came across an article that made my blood boil.
In a nutshell, it was about the designer, Cath Kidston, and how she doesn’t fill her home with her own products. Does Marc Jacobs wear the dresses he designs for women?! No – quite often a designer will keep their personal life separate from their product and surely one can see why. I love the Cath Kidston stores and always have an item or two from there on my wish list, but of course it would be slightly odd if you packed your home full of their products and tried to emulate the shop floor.
However, that part of the article was merely the tip of the iceberg. The idiotic writer of this article, Yasmin lbhai-Brown, went on to accuse all of those women who like vintage style of wanting to hark back to an era where women stayed at home and simply cleaned, cooked, looked after children and served up dinner at the end of the day in a piece of pretty tableware!
Excuse my French, but what utter bollocks! The implication that if you shop vintage then you must want to live like some sort of 50s housewife is so insulting to stylish women who choose to dress or decorate their home in this way.
Guess what, we do know how tough it was for women back then and we have no desire to go back to this bygone era. We are simply appreciating the design element and buying things with our own hard-earned cash.
I follow lots of style blogs and know that whilst some may find the Cath Kidston/ Emma Bridgewater trend rather twee, there is a plethora of strong, successful and intelligent women who aren’t writing about their dreams of being a housewife but just expressing their personal style choices.
Now, some will say that I have completely fallen for the Daily Mail antagonistic style of writing but I simply had to ‘respond’ in my own way to this piece of dreadful, misinformed journalism.
As you will probably glean from this blog, I love vintage style but I also have a career and am an equal in my relationship…see it can be done!
hannahhotcakes 