Theres a new(ish) event thats happening every year (well, it started last year and hopes to continue!) that celebrates everything great about Britain over the last 50 years. From fashion to furniture the place oozes an appeal that this last few years seem to have lost.
VINTAGE is a festival dedicated to everything great about Britains past few decades. Based this year in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, the place has been painted, dressed up, polished and cleaned, with each era situated in a different part of the building. Textiles, food, artists, music, it’s all there. If you fancy a pint while chilling out to live bands playing Pink Floyd or The Who, or even learning to dance to 40′s swing, your in luck. To say that the place is nostalgic is the wrong word to use, as when you standing there listening to a band playing Iggy Pop and The Stooges: The Passenger, in a room complete with the famous orange and brown wallpaper, furniture including the stereo-typical 70′s brown fabric sofa, you forget entirely whats going on in the real world at the moment and slip back in time. This feeling was helped by the vast amount of people who came dressed in garb from their favorite time.
Then there were the boutiques set up selling old, loved, dresses, suits and other clothes. The highlight of which was Fraubraun. Ms Braun has amassed quite a collection of pristine condition clothes from as early as the 1930′s, all the way through to almost the modern age.
Daisy and Pearl Lowe’s fashion show was incredible also, and not only for the haunting ballerina theme they seemed to be going with. Some of the clothes were stunning.
Outside, the Vintage Village contained all sorts of vintage clothes, toys, jewellery from the last 50 or 60 years, more live music, food & drink, and an amazing selection of people. There was also the Chap Olympiad. The Chap is a magazine that is trying to start a movement to return us to the days of tweed and trilby’s, and the Olympiad is the olympics for the unfit, unathletic and exceptionally well dressed. Events include things such as Butler Baiting, where a group of gentlemen surround a butler and try to bait him by giving him unreasonable tasks, such as mixing vodka and dry martini. Then theres Umbrella Jousting, where two chaps ride along on push bikes, armed with an umbrella and a copy of the daily telegraph and try to dismount their opponents. It sounds loopy, and it is, but again in all this madness, there is something about the moustaches, tweed, smoking pipes and brogues. Something that is without doubt sorely missed from todays world, and yet it’s something that you can’t quite put your finger on.
Otherwise if soaking up all this memorabilia is not your thing, you could settle down with the hip and trendy in the food & drink area where there’s more live music, and plenty of champagne and proper ginger beer. One things for certain, i’ll be coming back next year when the festival returns to Goodwood…
Anyway, here are some pics. The bulk of these are from Daisy & Pearl Lowes fashion show, but theres plenty of others showing the interesting characters walking about too.
