The Painful Realization that 2004 is Vintage

the evolving definition of 'vintage' & quality in modern resale

I’m Emily Stochl, a vintage & secondhand fashion reporter 🎤 and this is Pre-Loved, an independent, go-to voice on all things resale.

Pre-Loved brings subscribers thoughtful vintage fashion commentary gathered from my 250+ interviews with vintage-lovers, dealers, shoppers, and collectors.

One of the most frequent comments I get on my archival fashion videos are: “but is 2003 [enter date here] really vintage?!”

I get it. I’m a millennial, and it’s been weird growing older and seeing styles I remember return again. Commenters tell me, “it’s hard for people born in the 90s to accept that the 2000s styles they grew up with are – by some definition! – authentically vintage now.”

Especially if those styles (low-rise jeans, anyone?) haunted you in your pre-teen years. Pictured: Bluemarine SS 2022.

But I think there’s more than growing-older-itis at play here.

We also feel discomfort about a changing definition of “vintage.” Let’s set the groundwork with our commonly accepted definitions. It’s widely accepted across clothing, furniture, etc. that things older than 100-years are considered “antique” — in fact, I don’t think I’ve heard any other year used as a benchmark.

When I got into vintage, nearly 15 years ago, I was originally taught the standard for “vintage” was 30-years or older. Why that definition?

We sometimes forget that “vintage,” as a fashion concept, has really only existed for about 75 years. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the first time fashion witnessed an explicit “vintage fashion trend phenomena” was in the 1950s when college students began to wear vintage racoon skin caps and furs, harkening back to a previously popular look from the 1920s.

Racoon reemerged because of the contemporary popularity of Davy Crockett — much like the way popular culture influences our fashion (and vintage fashion) trends today — and young people tracked down secondhand versions of these (once quite expensive) furs.

In the 1920s, a racoon fur coat would have retailed for between $350-$500, which is about $5,000 today adjusted for inflation. These coats would have been an investment item, intended to last the wearer for years and years. And last, they did.

So much so that when racoon furs became popular again in the 1950s, young East Village “hipsters” were able to get the prevalent vintage versions for a discount on the original price.

And because of the 30-year gap between 1920 and 1950, as well as the popular axiom of the 30-year trend cycle, culture landed on “thirty years” as the accepted definition of vintage.

But as I write this to you in 2025, I don’t think that 30 years as our benchmark is even on the table anymore. That would mean today’s vintage only applies to pieces older than 1995, and it’s been truly forever since I’ve heard anyone challenge the late-90s as being anything but “vintage.” Pictured: Anna Sui FW 1998 from Vogue Runway

These days, it’s extremely common to accept anything 20 years-old as “vintage,” and some major sources even push the definition to 15 years.

20-years is the aged cited by Etsy, Depop, Poshmark, The RealReal, and popular journalists ranging from Apartment Therapy to Martha Stewart.

That said, major players like eBay and Vestiaire Collective both use 15-years as their definition of “vintage,” making anything older than 2010 a contender by their standards.

Vestiaire Collective’s use of 15-years is particularly interesting because they are the only major resale platform to have established quality parameters as part of their framework to define and ban “fast fashion” from their platform. These benchmarks are significant, and we’ll return to them.

There has also been a noticeable uptick in interest in what Vogue calls “not-so-vintage-vintage,” for example, Lily-Rose Depp wearing a Chanel fall/winter 2020 runway look on the Red Carpet this season (Lord help me, I still think of 2020 as “last season,” not five years ago…).

Also contributing to the changing definition, is the fact that Vogue will pretty much call anything that’s not current season “vintage,” including brand new recreations of archival designs:

From Maison Schiaparelli:

“Actress Carey Mulligan appeared in Custom Schiaparelli Haute Couture, designed by Daniel Roseberry, to the 81st Annual Golden Globe Awards… this gown is a modern reinterpretation of an original Elsa Schiaparelli Couture gown, Collection August 1949.”

The word “vintage” is starting to feel really fuzzy, isn’t it? Here comes the part where I tell you: there is no legally-accepted definition of the word.

In a 2024 court ruling (What Goes Around Comes Around vs. Chanel), the judge ruled that according to legal dictionaries, Merriam-Webster, and the Federal Trade Commission, there is no legal standing definition of “vintage” that is conclusive.

The English major in me — who spent whole semesters studying syntax, language and definitions — feels obligated to remind readers it’s very common for definitions to evolve over time. Definitions evolve because of the way people use them, and definitions are only useful if they effectively communicate a shared meaning to others.

For example, in English the world “naughty” used to mean something of little or no value. Today we might use the word “worthless” to get to that meaning. Overtime, the word “naughty” evolved to mean “bad behavior.” There are hundreds of these kinds of examples.

As the TikTokers say, “we listen and we don’t judge.” This piece isn’t about passing judgement on whether it’s “a good thing” for the definition of vintage to change or not — rather, it’s about trying to come to a mutual understanding with readers on the modern lexicon of the word.

The whole reason I use “pre-loved” in my own branding is because — to me — the act of re-use is what matters most. I want to be factually accurate in my reporting — which is why a definition around “vintage” matters — but in my values, I just want to see great garments live on.

So, now that we’ve accepted we must make our own definition, we will. First, by exploring the definition of “vintage” in wines.