Dressing Vintage on a Budget

I love vintage clothing. I would love to dress like I stepped out of the 1950s every day. However, vintage clothing costs money, and I have other technically more important things I need to spend my money on. Therefore, over time I’ve developed various ways of achieving a vintage-ish vibe without spending much money on it. Since I know there are many ladies who are in the same boat as I am, and love vintage style but don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, I thought I would share with you some of the most useful tips I’ve discovered in the art of dressing vintage on a budget.

What You Should Be Looking For

1. Presumably you have a general idea of the kind of vintage style you’d be interested in dressing in, but to get a more concrete sense of what pieces of clothing will help you achieve that look, spend some time looking up pictures from the period you’re interested in. You might realize that some clothing you already own – or could easily obtain – would look vintage if tweaked or if paired with a particular outfit.

Look at these lovely ladies, for instance.

That top on the left could easily pass as modern, but with the matching jacket and pleated skirt it immediately looks unmistakably vintage.

(To tell you a secret…I actually kind of never did this step. But I heard other people suggest it and it makes sense, so I’m putting it here.)

Then once you know just what you’re looking for, you can begin with

The Basics

2. Haunt your local thrift store. The thrift store is a beautiful place, my friends. It’s so much fun to spend time just wandering around in the thrift store, looking over all the books and movies, gasping over the absolutely beautiful dinnerware that ends up there, smiling over all the bizarre knicknacks, trying to convince family members that it would be a totally safe and good idea for you to buy those very rusty roller skates that are probably at least fifty years old. (You will not succeed in the last endeavor.) But perhaps best of all, the thrift store is a fantastic place for finding clothes. Not only is it one of the most inexpensive places to buy clothes, I find that it’s much easier to find vintage-looking clothing – and just pretty clothing in general – second-hand.  Some thrift stores have sections dedicated to vintage clothing specifically, which is obviously a good place to look, but you can find lovely timeless-looking pieces mixed in with the other clothing too.

3. I kind of already said this in #1, but I suppose it bears repeating: not every piece of clothing you wear has to be obviously from a different era; some can be just simple timeless styles. A simple A-line skirt doesn’t have to look vintage, but when properly accessorized and with the right blouse, it can. Having staples in your closet that you can build around is always helpful.

4. If you can sew, take advantage of that! Vintage patterns can be hard to use (or so I’ve been told; I’ve never tried myself), but if you are an advanced sewer you can use actual vintage patterns, which would obviously be very cool.

But you can also sew some of those aforementioned timeless staples, or you could even try to figure out your own patterns from looking at vintage clothing.

The Accessories

In my opinion, accessorizing an outfit in a vintage style can do wonders in making a non-vintage outfit look retro – it’s almost more important than the main outfit itself. Firstly and most importantly is

5. Style your hair in a vintage style. Pin curling costs nothing as long as you own bobby pins, and foam rollers can also be obtained very cheaply. If you (like me) don’t like spending large amounts of time doing your hair, look up and experiment with some easy vintage up-dos instead. My go-to vintage up-do looks like this:

Another trick I’ve developed is just pin-curling my bang-section. It takes literally a minute or two to do, and that soft bit of wave on the side of the face automatically lends a vintage look to things even if I don’t bother to put the rest of my hair up.

6. Wear retro shoes. Actual vintage shoes or vintage reproductions are probably Not Within the Budget, but vintage-looking shoes are pretty easy to find (especially at my favorite place, the thrift store). I find that this makes an enormous difference in making an outfit look retro. High heels will look the most vintage, but if you’re not comfortable in heels/would prefer flats for everyday, black ballet flats or something similar would work just fine as well.

A tip I’ve learned when buying high heels, by the way, is to find shoes in which the heel slopes in a little so that it’s right under the center of your heel, instead of the heel going straight down at the back of the shoe. Here’s a picture of my own well-loved retro shoes so you can see what I mean:

This is both a more vintage style and more comfortable, so it’s a win-win!

7. Makeup. As well as not liking to spend a long time on my hair, I also don’t like spending a long time applying makeup. However, just applying a classic shade of red lipstick takes perhaps thirty seconds to do (and lipstick can be bought at Walmart for about a dollar) and it automatically makes your look more vintage. If red stands out too much for your tastes/doesn’t work well for your skin tone, try a softer shade of pink and see how you like that; pink was a vintage lipstick shade as well.

8. And of course any other accessories you might have/can obtain quite easily from the thrift store can add to a vintage look – classic/vintage-looking earrings, a pretty belt, a clutch purse, or a retro hat or hair scarf. As aforementioned, accessories can really make the difference in elevating a pretty outfit to a retro outfit.

(An accessory I’ve yet to try but really want to is a collar – I have several plain t-shirts and just adding a plain white collar to them should do wonders in making them look more vintage. I’ve found a pattern which is just exactly what I want:

Though I’d want to make it detachable, so I could just make one collar and use it on any shirt I wanted.)

9. And as a last, completely optional idea, you could try doing your nails. (Nail polish can also be obtained from Walmart for about a dollar – though cheap nail polish tends to chip exasperatingly quickly. Ask me how I know this.) Shades of reds and pinks are best if your preferred look is from before the 1960s, and nails were also in a longer more oval shape during this time.

(I’m experimenting with trying for this nail shape right now. I usually keep my nails very short, so time will tell if I find this too annoying and give up.)

Ladies would often match their nail color to their lipstick color, so if you want to try a particular shade of lipstick, it would be a fun detail to buy matching nail polish!

Thanks so much for reading! Is vintage fashion a topic you’d be interested in seeing me talk about more? Would there be interested in “a week of outfits” type posts or some such?

Are there any ideas here you’d like to try? Do you have tips for dressing vintage on a budget? What’s your favorite decade for vintage style?