So you may just be getting into the vintage clothing community, and you find everything about it fascinating. You may have even gone for a few hunts at garage sales, vintage stalls, estate sales, and thrift stores. Searching for gold through someone’s forgotten garments.
In this search, your focus isn’t just on any kind of clothing. You are looking for vintage wear, which are dresses, clothing, and garments whose style is at least 20 years old, and not over 100 as that would be referred to as antique.
What are vintage clothing labels?
Well, they are labels that you find on vintage clothing. But they often times serve as authenticity stamps that certify that an article of clothing is genuinely vintage. This has made old clothing & garment labels very important in the hunt for clothing from a past era.
These are the 5 ways one can use labels to find vintage clothing:
- Printed or Woven Labels
The printed labels tell you that such attire was produced between the 1950s and the later part of the 1970s. These also show that the vintage clothing might be made of low-quality material and therefore cheaply produced.
Meanwhile, the opposite is the case for the woven labels. Vintage clothing found with woven labels are usually made of high-quality materials and expensive to produce.
This is an essential piece of information if one hopes to resell these items.
- Copyright Year on Labels
The year displayed on the label of vintage clothing shows the year that clothing’s brand was copyrighted. This should probably be the first place to look when verifying if a dress is vintage. To be safe, make sure that the copyright year is at least 20 years older than today.
- Country of Manufacture
When you see the country of manufacture displayed on the front of the label, e.g., Made in America, then one can say that the clothing most likely comes from the 1980s. At that point in time, a lot of clothes worn in the US were made in the US. That isn’t the case today. And if countries of manufacture are still displayed, they are at the back of the label and not on the front.
- No Zip code
If you see a dress you admire while shopping for vintage clothing, check the label for zip codes. If they aren’t any, then there
This is because zip codes were only put to use in America less than a 100 years ago. In fact, zip codes weren’t used in the US until after 1963. So if you have a dress whose label only shows the name and address of the brand, then that clothing could be safely be dated as pre-1963.
- Vintage Brands
Apart from revealing the quality of clothing or location of manufacture, labels had on them the names of the brands that designed and made them. Hence names of designers were on the labels of these wears. There are archives of these old brands and having knowledge of them can go a long way in helping you verify the authenticity of vintage wear when you spot the brand name on its label.
Armed with these tips above, I hope you find luck whenever you go vintage clothing hunting again!
The post 5 Ways to Help Identify Vintage Clothing by Brand Labels appeared first on CBF Labels Inc.
