HOW TO DATE VINTAGE CLOTHING
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WHY DATE VINTAGE & LUXURY CLOTHING?
As the resale market grows, the ability to date vintage & luxury clothing becomes more important. As a seller you can interest buyers more by helping them to understand the product. As a buyer, you can look for clues when shopping online or in vintage stores and make informed choices. TRUSS focuses on Luxury & Streetwear fashion rather than unknown vintage brands. We have produced brand-specific dating guides which can be found here.
Here are some more benefits to dating luxury and vintage clothing:
1. Authenticity verification: By discovering the date of release, you can conduct more research into that era to get a better understanding of authenticity. For example, a Nike T-shirt from last year is far more likely to be counterfeit than one released in the 80s, when counterfeiting was less prominent.
2. Product details: By conducting more research into the brand and its different eras, one can find detailed information about the garment, including the collection, season, value, and even the designer. Helping to contextualise the product is becoming even more important as a seller of vintage clothing.
3. Enhanced shopping experience: As a buyer, you can make more informed purchasing decisions. Knowing the specific details of a garment can help you choose the right piece for your collection.
4. Pricing & Valuations: By understanding the era of release, you may be able to find similar items and uncover the value of your clothing item. For example, an item from Raf Simon's first collection will be valuable as a collectors item.
Before diving into the rest of the article, if you are looking for product identification, valuation and dating at scale, please get in touch with a member of TRUSS's team here. We can help provide solutions to automate this process and catapult your clothing resale business into the future, reducing the busy work associated with researching every product. This can instantly turn an unknown kilo of clothes, into a collection of valuable products.
Dated clothing sells for an average of 15% more than its non-dated counterparts. That means standard marketplace fees can be retrieved simply by following this process.
STEP 1 : FIND THE BRAND
The first step is a simple one. Presumably, since you have made it to this step, you already know the brand. If you do not know the brand, the first point of call is the neck tag or wash tag. For luxury clothing, this will almost always give you this information.
These tags can normally be found in the interior of the clothing item, whether you are trying to date any item. Jeans, trousers, jackets or shirts, you name it. If you are struggling to find this, explore pockets, seams and other parts of the item.
TRUSS has already produced brand specific guides for several brands. If you are trying to date one of the following then please click on the link:
Please get in touch on Instagram if you would like us to explore another specific brand.
STEP 2 : SERIAL AND LABEL CODES
High-end, luxury and streetwear brands will often provide the dates of release on the wash tag. These would have been located in Step 1. Warning, this can be tricky. What you are looking for is a collection of numbers that might indicate the year and season of production or release.
If you consult the example of this Comme des Garçons wash tag. Without knowing anything about their serial code system one can clearly make out the numbers 2018. This signifies that the item will have been produced or released in that year. Some brands will display simply 18 to denote the same information.
Many brands do not make it this easy and will sometimes use a single number such as 8 to denote the year. However 8 could belong to 1998, 2018, or 1988 and so on. In this case, it is important to understand and use several important resources to determine the year, decade or general era.
Sometimes, year codes are not as simple as this. This is why TRUSS has created several brand specific guides.
STEP 3 : USE BRAND & LABEL RESOURCES
For those seeking to date vintage or luxury clothing, when the information is not available on the garment itself, this is not the end of the road. There are several resources where you can date vintage clothing without this information.
1. TRUSS's App which can be downloaded on the App Store is a database that contains thousands of historic fashion items, with their corresponding year of release. It includes detailed information about each piece. Simply filter out the brand you are looking for and browse the database and you may be able to find the information you are looking for.
2. Vintage Fashion Guild's Label Resource. This is an excellent resource which shows what eras the tags for certain brands belong to. The drawback is that these tend to correspond to decades and less specific timeframes. We recommend to use this in two circumstances.
(i) The specific year can't be found on the label, serial codes or on TRUSS. If this is the case, the era of release is the next best option.
(ii) You have found the date or season code. But it only gives limited information like F2. This could mean Fall 2002, Fall 1992 and so on. In this case using the neck tag to discover the decade will help you specify the year of release.
3. FirstView or Vogue Runway. Many brands will produce collections that will be featured on the runway. These resources document these runway shows and the items featured. You may have used the vintage label resource to understand the era or decade. Then, you can discover the runway collections and see what year and show the item was featured.
By utilising these resources, you can dig deeper into dating luxury and vintage clothing, and reap the benefits of doing so.