Why Vintage

We honor the power of vintage clothing to carry stories, to inspire, to enchant, and to radically shift the way society conditions us to consume resources, inhabit gender roles, and define beauty.

    • Fashion is currently the third most polluting industry in the world, filling our soil, atmosphere, oceans, and watersheds with plastics and toxic chemicals, consuming huge quantities of water, energy, and other resources, and significantly contributing to the climate crisis. (Reformation is a great resource for learning more about the impact of the fashion industry.) Every garment that you buy second hand is one less garment that has been manufactured-- often under inhumane conditions--, packaged, and shipped, and is one less garment in a landfill.

 

    • When you buy vintage, you undermine the mass marketing machine that tells us as a culture what we should want and when. Buying vintage situates your fashion choices outside the retail schedule of seasons that dictates that only certain colors, silhouettes, and patterns (and therefore only the bodies those shapes suit) are desirable now. You step out of the false temporality of the fad and into the field of time-tested style. Good design is always good design. Good materials and construction will always look and feel better than clothing meant to be forgotten in three months.

 

    • Shopping vintage subverts the gender binary of the “women’s section” and the “men’s section.” While most of the clothing at Charm School was originally designed for and worn by female identifying bodies, we’re here to tell you that there’s no such thing as men’s or women’s clothing and to wear what you want. And we’re here to support you through the process of discovering what that may be, no matter your gender, expression, or orientation.

 

  • Wearing vintage honors our ancestry. We literally walk in the shoes of our mothers, fathers, and grandparents and perhaps understand more of their experience by embodying their aesthetic.