Who is ‘Love Vintage’? ‘Love Vintage’ is me, Cary Whitley – someone who still gets ridiculously excited at the thought of visiting a vintage fair or who will rub my hands together in anticipation as I walk through the door of a brocante shop in an outlying French village or slams the brakes on at a sign saying “Boot Fair Today!” On a stall offering a hundred different items, I pride myself on always spotting the one that may not be the most obvious, but the one which will invariably turn out to be the most delightful.
What is ‘Vintage’? Many vintage items often come to light because they had been put away, sometimes set aside for a generation, before being re-presented or coming back into fashion and being dug up by vintage archaeologists like me. Other vintage items have stayed in circulation because they continue to fit our sense of value or beauty – and have just got older. These are the classics, the constants, the things we will always need, the things where the new versions are pale imitations. We want the originals with their chips and dinks and dents and fading colours and their smells and uneven surfaces. In ‘vintage’ the product isn’t newly made. It’s already out there in the past: it just needs finding, saving, enjoying and maybe then handing on again. That’s where you come in…
What is the value of ‘Vintage’? Many of us feel we are lost in a fast-moving technological world of surfaces and uncertainty and built-in obsolescence, where, as was once said, we can easily come to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The value of vintage is the opposite: its value lies in its quality, its longevity, its resonance with childhood, its offer of things you are sure you want to have and look after, things you want to enjoy a lasting relationship with.
Is ‘Love Vintage’ a new venture? No, ‘Love Vintage’ is well-established, previously selling at vintage fairs around the country, in the Vintage Village at the Country Living Fairs and debuting online at the Dorset Brocante Fair and shopatlovevintage on Instagram. But it has not grown into the popular, flourishing, talked-about business it is today by accident. For a business that deals in old things, ‘Love Vintage’ has always looked to develop new opportunities and see things with a new lens, most recently taking the whole business online when the pandemic struck in early 2020. In doing so, ‘Love Vintage’ now has an even wider clientele, both in the UK and abroad.
Sourcing: If you can’t see what you are looking for on these pages I can also source particular items for you or may have it in the stock room – please drop me a note via the contact page.