I have always loved wearing old clothes. The thrill of thrifting has been a high I love as long as I can remember. However, for a long time my instinct has been to just get whatever caught my eye and I could afford and that fit. The more sparkly and ostentasious the better. This resulted in a lot of clothes from the 80s (GO FIGURE). In the last year, however, I have tried to make a transition to a more discerning palette when it comes to the hair, makeup and clothes I don of bygone eras.

If you follow people who are also trying to do this on Instagram you will find a plethora of the most polished, beautiful, and sometimes vampish people you can imagine. Most are at most a size 8. I, like many others, have found that in looking to others for inspiration I unfailingly compared myself to these people. That’s the trap of social media in general I suppose. These girls seemed to have the most beautiful pristine true vintage garments that seemed to come alive from an MGM Musical. They would hashtag these works of wearable art #truevintage. The more I looked the more I wanted to be able to say that; that #truevintage was starting to taunt me.

I started searching my normal haunts: Poshmark, Ebay, Etsy. None of them would fit my extreme hourglass frame. They were all tiny. I was dismayed; I have seen so many beautiful larger women from the 1940s-60s in photos. WHERE WERE THOSE CLOTHES? The anger filled me with more of a self image existential crisis than I’ve had in years. I had long accepted that a lot of mainstream clothes wouldn’t work on my frame and just knew how to eye things and know where to go, but I was not used to feeling this way looking at vintage clothes (probably because I didn’t have a point of reference of what I was looking for.)

In desperation I consulted one of the Vintage Facebook Groups I belong to (Vintage Tips and Tricks-mostly UK based but a great little community). This group had some wonderful insight into things I had never thought of. The more practical concept was that most experienced vintage sellers will use “VOLUP” in their descriptions to signify that they are “plus size” pieces.

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The second, more conceptional idea was a response to my exasperated question, “WHERE IS ALL THE PLUS SIZE VINTAGE?” The answer of course was that as these items were larger it was more easily passed down from family member to family member until the garment was inevitably worn to rags and then thrown out. OF COURSE! It’s so interesting to me that I spend so much time thinking about the story of the person who originally wore a piece but never think of the full journey a garment goes through to get from midcentury to me. It’s so silly to believe that it’s a direct line. So it makes it more miraculous and more of a journey when you own a piece of plus size vintage; so many lives have probably been touched by it.

So with this new found knowledge I went hunting for a dress that would fit that was in my price point. I finally found a pretty blue 1950s dress that needed some minor mending for less than $15 so of course I bought it.

I debuted my first #truevintage dress last week and as luck would have it, it was also the most successful vintage hair style I’ve ever mustered. I felt on top of the world!

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