Wayne Hemingway — de-signer, trendsetter and fashion watchdog — was interviewed by the Telegraph before his festival ‘Vintage at Goodwood’ took place over the weekend. He made two claims that inspired me, not a natural festival-goer, to dial the booking hotline: ‘There will be attendants for each toilet so that they are as clean on the last day as they were on the first,’ he said, and then, ‘You’ll probably look a bit out of place if you turn up in shorts and sandals.’ These are the kind of bold assertions that have made him an arbiter of taste. Who could resist such a challenge? Mr Hemingway, sir, a ticket please! I ironed my shorts and polished my sandals instanter.
With his festival Hemingway intended to showcase the best of 20th-century British cool, to celebrate each decade from the 1940s to the 1980s. In a green field in Sussex, every group, club or gang from within each of those decades — people who live and breathe their ‘niche’, who have perfected every detail of their look — could get dressed up in their best clothes and dance all night. This would be a playground for lovers of vintage, and best of all it would be a playground in which no one would get a kicking for their hairstyle, their outfit or their taste in music.
As well as dedicated followers of fashions past there would be dabblers like myself — the truth is, it wasn’t just the promise of attended loos that lured me in. Searching out old, used, cheap clothes in charity shops and jumble sales has long been one of my favourite occupations.
It is a habit that used to be rather sniffed at, definitely not something anyone boasted about. Discreet communications might have taken place between rummagers, when one identified another, but open discussion of a preference for secondhand clothes would have been unthinkable.
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