The Best Vintage Boho Clothes Aren’t Just From the ’00s

In an interview published before her Chloé debut, Kamali mentioned that she collects vintage blouses—she has “600 or 700,” and they are “organized by color,” starting “with white and off-white and then going into beiges and blush tones.” “If there’s one thing that’s very Chloé, it’s the blouse,” she told my colleague Mark Holgate.

The blouse. It’s an item that has fallen out of favor. We buy button-downs, T-shirts, and turtlenecks instead. Some women with proper office jobs still wear a blouse as part of their professional dress code, but otherwise it has lost its status as a desirable object. The Chloé show changed that. The white ruffled lace blouse (tucked into two-tone jeans and worn with wooden clogs) Kamali sent dow the runway seems poised to become one of the low-key must-haves of the season, but looking to get a jump on the trend, I decided to follow the designer’s own example and hit up the vintage stores instead.

Earlier this month at the A Current Affair vintage show in Brooklyn, which gathered more than 60 vintage vendors from all over the country, the boho influence was beginning to take shape, but not in the way that I predicted. Although there were a handful of designer archive finds that fit the brief—I left behind a gorgeous vintage white-on-black polka dotted off-the-shoulder Yves Saint Laurent blouse, for example—it was antique pieces like little Victorian and Edwardian cotton and lace blouses and semi-sheer frilly slips and gowns from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s that felt like the essential things to add to my wardrobe right now.