Dressing to the hilt of urban fashion doesn't mean that every single piece in your wardrobe has to be brand-new, purchased from the mall this week in order to stay in style until next week. Sometimes, articles of clothing that you've held onto for years will make a sudden comeback, if only for a moment. In the hip-hop culture we refer to these items as throwbacks - fashion items that are from an earlier era, but have become popular again for any number of reasons, these can include:
? Neutral type items - articles of clothing like loose-fitting blue jeans or plain white T-shirts - items like these tend to find new life with every fashion cycle. Every year, when people begin to attend all of the shows that are exhibiting the latest lines from the hottest designers in urban fashion, these pieces are guaranteed to be exhibited in one form or another. There are several ways of embellishing these items but at the core of it they are the same pieces.
? Baseball caps - these may be bearing the logos of popular sports teams, hometowns or even familiar sayings - these essential items can often times grow in fashion value with the significance of the embellishments on the caps. Having an older baseball cap from a popular team that has changed its logo, has certain intrinsic value as a throwback piece; aside from being a more difficult to find piece of clothing, something of this nature will often times carry value as a collector's item.
? Hard-to-find sneakers - various brands of sneakers have been around for decades; over the years, these brands have come out with tons of different styles of sneakers - if you have been lucky enough to hold onto, have passed down or find a pair of the older sneakers from the various brands, you'll discover that in the urban fashion arena these pieces have an automatic aura of cool about them.
So when it comes to shopping at a vintage shop for the throwback urban gear, there are a few things that should be kept in mind. On my first trip to a vintage clothing shop, one of the first things that I saw was a rainbow Afro wig. This is not an article that you would want to rate highly on your list of must haves for urban fashion, so you'd be wise to stay away from the wilder pieces that you come across in a vintage store.
While shopping in a vintage door you want to make sure that your focus is on being fashion forward, even though you're looking at a collective history of fashion. Remember when it comes to fashion, as with other things, everything goes in cycles. Items that may have been popular 10 years ago, and not have been seen since, may suddenly make a splash in the fashion world because of their past popularity, memory inspiring looks or value as an accent piece to more modern clothing. Not all of these vintage or antique looks will match up with currently produced articles, but some articles will have the opportunity to shine again. Your job, and looking at vintage clothing, is to predict what will work. In a sense you're making an educated guess of where fashion will go.
This may sound like a daunting challenge, as not many of us are fashion pros were trendsetters, but if you pay attention to the cycle of fashion trends, you will find that there tends to be a bit of rhyme and reason to the flow of the trends. As an example, every so often, straight legged jeans will make a brief appearance as a fashion statement; these often tight fitting and slimming jeans will appear and disappear from time to time, showing up at random times as fashion designers see fit. Keep in mind as you try and predict the trends, that the reason that fashion goes in cycles is that there are only so many ways that you can design a pair of blue jeans; this means that you have a choice of cycling through the baggy jeans, the comfort fit jeans, the elephant leg jeans and the straight leg jeans. The major differences that are made during each cycle is simply to change the finish of the jeans and the colors, but the basics still remain.
Author Resource:
Jermain Grenville is a fashion writer and urban culture expert with over a decade of experience in the urban fashion world. Find out more at new era or new era atlanta braves
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