When you grow up listening to Solid Gold (now Coast), you start believing that music from the 60s and 70s – and anything else from that era – is better. 30 years on and I’m stuck with my vintage obsession, always a number of years behind my peers, eschewing the new and cool for timeless and ironic.
I'm lucky that Viva.co.nz appreciates the past too, and that we are in a nostalgia-hungry era – thanks to the internet, we now relive our lives a few minutes after the fact. For one and a half years, I've had the pleasure of writing about vintage music, fashion, films and trends each week in my Throwback Thursday column.
I've been lucky enough to interview Brandy, Cherie Currie of the Runaways and Steve Diggle of The Buzzcocks. I've interviewed the producer of Poi E, the team behind long-running food truck The White Lady and "Mr Ollie" of Ollies Ice Cream Parlour.
I've researched old-school fitness fads and pondered over the dated aspects of retro recipes. I've even taken a swipe at current trends, such as bone broth aka the stock my dad has been making for years.
Sadly, this is my last time writing this column, but I'll still be out there, living the vintage dream: cheering on the likes of TLC and Guns N' Roses when they come to town, Netflixing the original Jem and The Holograms and TV remake of Scream, collecting My Little Pony toys and BPA-packed Tupperware, trawling the city and internet for cultural relics and people breathing new life into vintage today.
There are probably a few lame psychological reasons behind my retro obsession, but there are worse things to love. You could say I’m missing out on the present, but finding beauty in things that may otherwise have been relegated to landfill appeals. Embracing the past helps me to stay slow in an increasingly fast world – Kimye who? – and reminds me where we have come from, and who sang it first.
It’s also a way of wearing rose-tinted glasses, escaping the less savoury aspects of this era, and conveniently forgetting those of the past. But even I may have reached my capacity for nostalgia – at least where clothing is concerned. They always say if you remember how bad something was the first time around, you’re not so willing to re-embrace it. My Sporty Spice look from the early 00s? I’ll leave that to the kids.
