If you think “contemporary vintage” is something of an oxymoron, and you still want to find an original piece at the relatively low prices that used to characterise vintage finds, then you may soon find yourself lost in the maze of vintage restoration. Consider, for example, the case of financial director Clare Nicholls, who earlier this year attended a “Passion for Fashion” auction at Kerry Taylor in London and became the smitten owner of a £360 vibrant pink 1966 Yves Saint Laurent couture gown. The full-length piece belonged to a not-very-careful previous owner (had it been in better condition, or had the auction been after Saint Laurent’s death instead of a few weeks before, the garment could have fetched up to £6,000). The catch: it wasn’t wearable.

“The dress was so cheap, I was really pleased. I could see that its skirt was shredded but I didn’t realise how unstable the beaded top part of it was,” says Nicholls. “I wanted to restore it so that the dress would fit and be safe to wear. I didn’t want to put it behind glass; I wanted to enjoy it.”

Preserving vintage clothes

Chris Paulocik, conservator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, advises:
● Store textiles, especially silk, away from light
● Make sure garments are clean: food stains can increase the risk of damage
● Wood or padded fabric hangers are best – wire can mis-shape and plastic hangers degrade or stain
● Don’t use dry-cleaning bags . Cover with muslin bags or cotton sheets
● Store flat-packed garments in an acid-free box with white, acid-free tissue

Insurance
Charles Dupplin, fashion and luxury goods expert at the insurers Hiscox, can advise on cover, be it for well-known designer piece or an anonymous silk 1920s dress. www.hiscox.co.uk

Restorers
Janie Lightfoot Textile Conservation & Restoration Studio, London (+44 (0)20-8963 1532)
The Conservation Register,
Total Wardrobe Care,
The Textiles Conservation Laboratory, New York,
Atelier for Textile Conservation , Germany

Auction houses
www.kerry
taylorauctions.com
www.christies.com
www.cornette.auction.fr

Enter Janie Lightfoot, a London-based restorer of textiles and costumes, whom Nicholls found through Kerry Taylor.

“I think we must be careful about being too precious [about vintage costume],” Lightfoot says. “It’s important to conserve them, to learn about the past and therefore the future, but that dress can go on and live. Clare was absolutely right to buy it, even in the state it was in, and it’s fine to want to wear it.” Whether it actually could be worn, however, was another question.

The silk of the skirt was irreparably shredded – not, as it turned out, by a careless owner but by its dye. “The type of dyes they used at the time corroded the fabric,” says Lightfoot. “But even many designers today don’t think about what dyes can do in the long term – for them it’s more about the visual effect. It happens a lot with couture, particularly when two mediums are used together – like plastics and silks – that are incompatible. It may look fabulous, but it won’t last.”

Then there was the difficulty in finding a silk to replace the damaged skirt, whose satin-back taffeta has a pink warp and pink weft, producing an unusual matte effect. “Just finding the right shade of pink was a day’s work,” says Lightfoot.

The real work of the restoration, though, was in the beadwork, an abstract geometric pattern of organic swirls made up of beads of all shapes and sizes in gold, jade, aqua, purple and tomato red – but no pink. “It’s very heavy and on a nylon net, which is good, but they didn’t think of the thread, which is cotton and not strong enough [to support the beads],” says Lightfoot.

As a result, the whole project took about 35 hours to complete and cost almost £1,500. Now that it is finished, where will the dress be worn?

“I had thought that I’d wear it to a gala,” Nicholls says, “but after trying it on, I thought no – I will have to keep this for my wedding. And, if that looks like being a long way off, I’ll just do the washing up in it!”