Stephen Bayley on Vintage

With this being such a widely deployed and (mis)used term today, we ask the Britain's leading design guru to define what vintage really means to him.

By Stephen Bayley on Thursday 24th November, 2011

The radio was playing 'Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Backseat' by Paul Evans and the Curls. Reluctantly, I turned it off and parked my Aspen Green ’59 Chevy Impala four-door hardtop, strode into the hacienda, slung my Schott Perfecto jacket onto the Herman Miller side-table and settled into the Eames chair with a highball of Old Fitzgerald bourbon to start fretting about what “vintage” really means. Hang on, I forgot to take off my Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Of course, none of this is true. Except the fretting. I think the idea of vintage needs a little ventilation.

Of course, the term originates in wine-making, but it is car people who have the strictest definition of what vintage means. In fact, there’s an enlarging opinion in the wine trade that “vintage” is a redundant concept now that new technology guarantees consistent quality year-on-year. Anyway, a 'vintage' car is one produced between 1919 and 1930, the period when the automobile evolved from an aristocratic contraption into a civilised mass-produced consumer product. 

So there is a sort of nostalgic yearning in the idea of a vintage or classic car: the sight (or possession) of one transports you on a rapid psychological journey to a more innocent age. And from this narrow historic definition, the idea of “vintage” has enlarged. But does “vintage” mean anything more precise than stylish nostalgia? Test the definition yourself: is the 1872 Albert Memorial vintage? Of course not. Is my 1959 Chevrolet Impala. Absolutely! Is my 2007 Mark One iPhone? Not yet. Now we are, philosophically speaking, getting somewhere.

I am being daring now, but vintage means “mass-market and mass-produced, but not very recently”. It takes on extra meaning if you assume, as I do, that it subsumes ideas including “retro”, “re-purposing”, “re-cycling”, “repro” and “classic”. And, of course, “modern”. Even “Post-Modern”, now that it has become an historical style label. Right now, “vintage” means “manufactured for consumers between about 1930 and 1990”. And anything manufactured for consumers in that heroic period inevitably had certain attributes style: clean lines, seductive curves, gorgeous colours, emotional appeal.

But the one thing that is certain about all style labels is that their definition is precarious. This was best understood by the brilliant fashion historian James Laver, whose pioneering 1937 BBC television series called Clothes Line scandalised the public by showing a woman in a backless dress. Viewers, blinking at a blurry, flickering image on a device more dated even than the You Tube iPad icon, took it be a shocking nude.

Laver, with a mixture of mischief and boldness, established the following vocabulary:
Indecent ten years before its time
Shameless five years before its time
Daring one year before its time
Smart current
Dowdy one year after its time
Hideous ten years after its time
Amusing thirty years after its time
Quaint fifty years after its time
Charming seventy years after its time
Romantic one hundred years after its time
Beautiful one hundred and fifty years after its time

This could be finessed a little, but is in general nearly perfect. In this definition, “vintage” means : amusing, quaint, charming. And quite soon, romantic. Works for me.

Stephen Bayley is a British design critic, author and co-founder of the Design Museum who has written for titles such as the FT, The Observer, GQ and the New Statesman. He is a regular contributor to Vintage Seekers.