Creative practices in vintage retailing

Tools

Hewer, Paul; Taillard, Marie and Preece, Chloe, eds. (2025) Creative practices in vintage retailing. In: The Power of Consumer Creativity. The Seven C’S of Creativity . SpringerNature, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 69-90. ISBN 9783031962479

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Abstract

This is a story about why and how stuff matters. It’s a story about vintage consumption and its contemporary relevance and how consumption morphs into production, in this case through the transformative moment of creative vintage retailing. It’s a story about entrepreneurial women who buy and sell vintage and a story about ‘fulfilling ambition’. It’s a story of thrifty finds, a story of treasure troving. It’s also a story of colour, style and floral motifs! It’s a story of aesthetic and affective labour. It’s a story about how recycling the past can provide inspiration for rethinking the present. In this sense, it deals with the cultural logic of vintage retailing as glimpsed through the lens of shifting contexts and conjunctures. Finally, it’s a story of consumers as creative improvisers who are busy recycling old ideals; and who, when they find a cultural form which is able to reframe their actions, tend to run with it. I utilise non-representational theory (post-structuralism) to make sense of how creativity works in such fragile retail encounters.

ORCID iDs

Hewer, Paul ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7661-8195; Taillard, Marie and Preece, Chloe
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)