Time After Time

In this artful jamboree of archival pieces, creativity and extraordinary craftsmanship form the connective thread. Meanwhile, Amanda Harlech recalls reinventing the future-by looking behind her.

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Vintage was not a word I connected with clothes in the '80s, when I started wearing older pieces constantly-I think I thought of wine or cars as vintage, but not clothes. I had always dressed out of the dressing-up box as a child, pulling out my great-aunt Helen's Poiret coat or her shredded opal Fortuny; I would dress my brothers up and make them hold couture poses while I finished the tableau myself. (My mother must have wanted these pieces to remain in our lives somehow, even if, in the '60s and '70s, she wasn't going to wear them herself.) This didn't last very long, though, and soon I had to content myself with drawing whole fashion magazines of shapes and stories.

But the glories of those dresses and capes and coats stayed with me like a language of feeling. I couldn't afford fashion as a student at Oxford in the late '70s, so my punkish trousers from the London label Boy ended up paired with an embroidered Chinese dressing gown from a thrift store. My greatest find at Oxford was a citrine, slippery bias-cut dress probably 1930swhich I wore constantly against the grain of puff-ball mutton-sleeve taffeta, which was what everyone else wore to a ball.

The thrift stores of this time were, of course, Aladdin's caves of jewel-level vintage, but at the time, nobody really wanted any of that. Somehow, though, the example of my courageous and beautiful great-aunt Helen-a whip-thin rebel and muse to artists, and a pioneering suffragette in World War I-era London (along with the Fortuny dress and Poiret coat, I also kept her taffeta frock coat and a marvelous striped velvet bias dress)-meant I wanted to dress like her too.