The boom in vintage has been around for a while – the idea that it’s the “hottest thing in fashion” – and I think that a big part of this can be attributed to the idea of friction: the thrill of the search, unearthing treasure rather than the anonymity of click and buy.

Beyond the anonymity of online shopping, vintage responds to an even deeper layer of anonymity in fashion. Over the past decade, streetwear has dominated the luxury industry, prompting luxury labels to abandon the qualities that once defined them – craftsmanship, attention to detail – replacing them with oversized logos on bags, hoodies and T-shirts. These logos became the driving force of the entire industry. The rise of vintage – and its position as the new luxury – is a reaction against this shift. As luxury grew more anonymous and detached from its roots, vintage emerged as its opposite.

Part of vintage’s appeal lies in its history. Every piece – whether an old band T-shirt or an archive Margiela – is rooted in a specific time and place, carrying a journey that brings it to the present. Things brings to mind the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff’s idea of an object biography, one that shows an object as “endowed with culturally specific meanings, and classified and reclassified into culturally constituted categories.” All objects have biographies, but vintage boasts of its biography. Luxury clothing used to emphasise craft, high quality fabrics and painstaking details, which all formed part of its biography. As it was replaced by streetwear, however, the industry deliberately flattened these histories in favour of a logo. The embrace of luxury shows how these biographies still matter.

Dog London