Buying vintage designer: the first checks

You are checking for agreement, not one tell

A garment is a set of decisions taken at one moment by one factory: the label woven that year, the zipper bought from a maker who signed it, the seams finished the way that house finished them. A good fake gets several of those right, because the forger works on what a photograph shows. Almost none get all of them at once.

Do the work before you pay. Afterwards you are negotiating a return policy.

The label, read slowly and all of it

Start with how the brand label is attached, not what it says: a house that stitched its labels down on four sides did not switch to two for one garment. Design changes across a house’s life, so the move is comparison, not memory. Hold your phone beside the garment with that house’s labels from the claimed era on screen: weave, letter spacing and stitching all read from a photograph.

Then the labels nobody photographs: country of origin, fibre content, size, care. Care labels became mandatory in the United States in 1972, and fibre content labels in Canada the same year, so a piece carrying neither is older than that, was made for a market that did not require them, or has had its tags cut out. Symbols instead of words are a later marker again, since the American rule only allowed them from 1997. A seller who knows which is one worth buying from.

The hardware, harder to fake than paper

Zippers come from a few makers and most sign their work: riri out of Switzerland, Lampo out of Italy, YKK out of Japan, each signing the back of the pull or the body of the slider. A zipper carrying no name earns a question, and so does the type, since metal teeth came decades before nylon coil and moulded plastic, and a nylon coil zipper rarely turns up in a garment made before the middle 1960s.

Then the rest of the metal. Plated base metal feels light in a way solid hardware does not, and a stamp that is soft or crooked reads as cast from a copy rather than struck. Plating wears off corners and high points gradually; wear in one flat patch is a different story.

Construction, with the garment inside out

The money shows on the inside. Seam finishing is a factory’s signature and expensive to fake because it costs labour rather than material: bound seams, a French seam, a hem finished by hand, a lining held at the armhole by a loose thread bar instead of caught down flat. Cheap reproduction announces itself here, the same synthetic overlock racing around every seam.

Then hold the thing. Good cloth from any era has a heft and a fall, and a piece lighter than it looks is telling you something no photograph will.

Condition, in daylight, before anything else

Take it to a window: shop lighting is built to sell and hides yellowing and where wear collects. Underarms first, where garments die: stiffness, a chemical smell, small holes where antiperspirant has eaten the fibre. Silk and old rayon go there first and do not come back. Then folds, hems and the seat, where colour goes along a crease pressed the same way for decades. Then wool under the collar for moth damage, which prefers the parts nobody brushes. Then the plating, and the lining, which shreds early and is the one repair a tailor makes gladly.

Where the checks stop

All of that filters the obvious: the wrong label, the weightless hardware, the dead underarm. It is not authentication, and no stack of these checks becomes one. Authentication is a person with reference material, the piece in their hands, and a written opinion signed with their name.

So the rule is proportion. For a forty dollar dress on a thrift rail your eyes are the process. For a purchase that matters, buy an opinion in writing before the return window closes, or take the piece to the house’s own counter, which does not authenticate but does decide whether to accept the piece for repair. How much of this happens before a piece reaches the floor depends on the format, which the guide to thrift, vintage and consignment sorts out; the journal’s Los Angeles note shows a deep vintage market from inside.

Questions to ask the seller

• Where did it come from, and how long have you had it?
• Has anything been replaced: zipper, lining, buttons, shoulder pads?
• Has it been altered, and is the original seam allowance still inside?
• What is the return window, and does it survive an authenticator’s opinion?
• May I photograph the labels and the hardware?

Buy from someone who expects to see you again

A shop that faces you on the street answers a question about a replaced zipper differently than an anonymous account. Browse the Toronto catalog, where every piece comes with a store attached, and ask before it is boxed.