The Golden Age of Vintage with Penelope Tree

0:28This is The Run Through. I'm Chloe Mal. Very, it was really cool. It was really, really cool. That is so fun. Yeah, and Julia actually commissioned Penelope to write a piece for our new issue. And it's so good. And it's just all about the birth of vintage and about that time in the 60s when Penelope was just kind of coming up on the scene. And London was just this amazing kind of place to be. And as far as vintage, the place to be was the Chelsea market. and you can literally find vintage Schiaparelli couture. Wow. You know, you could spot one of the Rolling Stones shopping there. It was just like, I mean, it was hard to talk to her about current vintage because she was just like, it just doesn't compare.

1:12You cannot find the kind of things that you did. So I'm really excited for you guys to hear this conversation. Before we get to the interview, Nicole Phelps, we are thrilled to have you here joining us for a special host summit, a meeting of the minds on yet another round of industry shakeups. Tell us everything. Give us a little, I feel like it's like a sports recap of the highlights of the week. Well, Monday morning, we woke up to the news that had broken many hours earlier in Paris that Jack and Lazaro from Prenza Schooler, designers who Vogue has been following since they were 21 years old, are going.

1:51Liz Lazzaro famously wrote a note on a Delta napkin and passed it to Anna in first class asking about internships. The greatest origin story in New York fashion, I think. They are going to Loewe. They are the new co-creative directors of Loewe, where Jonathan Anderson recently stepped down after 11 years. And how exciting for them to be in their early 40s and starting anew. and to be in Paris, a place where they've always wanted to live, and to inherit a brand that, you know, really is just going from strength to strength. Incredible accessories at L 'Oeve, obviously, and Jonathan was making really inventive clothes and some of the most fun fashion shows, I think, around.

2:44So they've really inherited a very cool brand, and now it is theirs to play with. So a big moment for them. We still don't know who is going to be designing Prenza Schooler. The last time I was there, which was in February, to see the new collection, they were in the process of interviewing contenders for the creative director job at Prenza Schooler. They said they were about, that's, you know, halfway through at that point. So maybe, maybe soon we'll know. And then Tuesday, there was more news. Tuesday, there's more news. Mugler, the house that Terry Mugler built, famous for his perfumes, of course.

3:27Casey Cadwalader, who has been there for about seven years as creative director, exited. And a new designer by the name of Miguel Castro Freitas was installed. And the interesting thing about this is that really he is almost nobody knows anything about him. OK, that makes me feel better because I was like, I'm not familiar with this gentleman. Me either. He too is in his early 40s, I would say. He is a graduate of Central Saint Martins, I think. And John Galliano gave him his first job actually in fashion at Dior. And for two decades now, he has been working behind the scenes. He worked for Stefano Pilati at Saint Laurent.

4:06He worked for Albert Albaz, the late great designer of Lanvin. He was at Dries Van Noten. He actually intersected with Julian Klausner briefly, who's the new creative director of Dries Van Noten. And most recently, he was at Sportmax. And so Mugler, a very different kind of label and heritage than Sportmax, obviously. Super sexy, super, I mean, confrontational is too strong a word, but very out there fashion, beloved of red carpet divas from Beyonce to Jerry Hall back in the day. It'll be his big moment later this year, too, along with everybody. It's going to be the September to Remember. Oh, I love that.

4:47Let's TM that. Exactly. Exactly. We're going to need to do a September to Remember like series. We should do something. Fashion September to Remember. Yeah. All right. I mean, do you feel like with Miguel, the trend for behind the scenes people is continuing? It does feel like the industry is kind of doubling down on that message that it's not about appointing kind of an independent designer who's built their own brand. But like, let's let's let people who have really put the work in behind the scenes to have a moment. Yeah, I think so. It's not about an Internet or a social media disruptor getting the job, which was a thing, you know, once upon a time.

5:27I think CEOs and headhunters are looking for people with a lot of experience. And probably the state of the economy and luxury fashion struggles right now play a lot into that. Laura Guibo at Vogue Business wrote a piece about Miguel. And one of the people she quoted, I think it was one of the headhunters, said that they're looking for product people now, designers who actually know how to make clothes that resonate on a retail level. That makes sense. Okay. So is this the new normal? Are we just going to be doing this every week that there's just scrambled – it's like scrambled eggs of fashion?

6:07Oh, well, knowing that Demna has left Balenciaga to go to Gucci, we know that there is another really big announcement coming sometime soon. And, of course, there is the question of Jonathan Anderson and where he is going and when that announcement is coming. Maybe after those two big announcements happen, we'll be nearing the end of this cycle. You know, it's all building up to this September, as I mentioned. Like, there's just going to be so many massive, massive debuts. But also then Michael Ryder at Celine, he has a June-July debut because he's showing, I think, somewhere between the men's and couture.

6:52In other fashion news, it was announced this morning in a very starry, glittery press conference on the Paramount Studios lot. All the details about Vogue World Hollywood. It was announcing all the costume designers who will be involved with the affair. and 100 % of the ticket proceeds will go to the Entertainment Community Fund with a focus on supporting the costume community professionals impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires. So it's feeling like we're getting into Vogue World season and everyone's very excited. I mean, we're really in Met season, but never too soon. It's the seven-month countdown.

7:34Yeah, exactly. And as I'm sure you've heard by now, especially from beloved Len Yeager, It is Vintage Week here at Vogue, and we have our extremely exciting vintage sale happening in both London and New York this weekend, with also proceeds going to victims of the Los Angeles wildfires, along with so much great coverage on both sites, in the magazine, including our guide to the best vintage stores around the world, which has been updated beautifully from last year, all kinds of wonderful essays and explainers. Choma, what are you excited about in the London sale? This is my thing. This is my thing.

8:17So I have my eye on several things. I actually have to make sure I have myself, give myself a limit. There are some wonderful pieces by Martine Rose that I'm super excited about that I need to make sure I have some restraint about. Who donated those? Those were sourced on eBay. As editors, we've all had a really fun time looking for like really rare, cool pieces. Super fun. Yeah, which has been fun. And then as far as, and then we're also, I guess this is more of a future vintage item, but the custom Burberry suit that was on the cover of the April issue will be on sale, which is super exciting.

8:52Penelope has also donated pieces. When she came into the studio, she brought a bag of pieces. Wow. What about you guys? Some of our teammates here, our colleagues have snuck down like little mice into the 20th floor to see the pieces that are available before they moved to the sale site. The pre-VIP sale. Yes, exactly. But there's a lot of provenance. Lots of good provenance. There's a lot of provenance. I'm trying to pull up the article about... Kendall Jenner. Provenance. Yes. Kendall Jenner donated... Some Dior. Some vintage John Galliano era Dior. Wow. Wow. And Karen Elson has given us a Givenchy top that Ricardo Tichy made himself and gave to her.

9:41Wow. And those are two big highlights. Where is the story about the highlights? It's a dress that Taylor Swift wore by Stacey Bendit of Alice and Olivia, which I imagine will fetch quite a bit of money given the fact that Taylor Swift wore it at the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2011 going back. That's wild. Almost a decade and a half. I think it's going to be really fun. I'm excited to see who comes. Alice Albert might be joining for part of it. She keeps her grubby hands to herself. Yeah, Choma, it's a really fun, you know, first weeks of spring moment in New York.

10:25I had the best time at the Frick Collection is reopening after five years of the most intensive renovation that Annabelle Selldorf masterminded. And it is so spectacular. They've nearly doubled the gallery size in the museum by opening up the second floor and adding many different new spaces that somehow seamlessly fit with the beautiful old mansion. It's a big few weeks for theater openings. The Othello opening was a very starry. Anna went with Coleman Domingo on her arm, as one does. I'm supposed to go to the picture of Dorian Gray opening tomorrow night, which I'm really excited about, with Sarah Snook playing all the roles.

11:09That's the thing this season, an actor playing all the roles. Apparently Andrew Scott doing that in Vanya is mesmerizing. Me, Marley, Chelsea, and Stephanie saw Purpose last week, which is so good. Oh, wow. And as you'll hear, we are interviewing Brandon Jacobs Jenkins soon about that, which I'm very excited about. So it just feels like a really starry, big theater season on Broadway. So Choma, I hope you feel FOMO because I always feel that way about the West End. Oh, really? Yeah, I know. I'm going to see The Seagull this next week. And we did a big piece in the magazine. It's with Cate Blanchett, Emma Corrin.

11:51The cast is kind of incredible. So I'm excited to go see that next week. I mean, I have to tell you, Choma, I don't know if this has been as much a thing for your team on your website, but we had a big protein moment on Vogue.com this weekend. I know. I've heard. I've heard about this protein moment. It's so funny because that is my entire algorithm, like how to get 100 grams of protein a day. I mean, I could not care less. I'm such a target of this, but like it has I am like there is not there is not enough like chicken I can eat apparently before I hit my goal. It's quite it's quite challenging.

12:28Protein is very important for women. Yes. Yes. We don't get enough of it. I heard it's not just 100 grams. I heard it's the number of grams you are in your weight. Yes. Right. Yes. So even more than 100 grams. You guys, I said Katie and Marco this weekend, I was like, who is looking at this? I'm impressed. But yes, it's a lot of hard-boiled eggs. Let's put it that way. Yeah, we had our best performing story, Princess Beatrice. Oh, my God. Tell me everything about how that happened. She actually approached us. Her baby was born prematurely. And I think she wanted to use it as a moment to sort of like tell her own story, but also kind of acknowledge that, of course, yeah, she's far more privileged than the average person.

13:20But those fears, those things that happen, those moments are kind of universal. And I thought it was really a really touching, really a sort of a great thing for her to do. And we got a lot of responses from our readers. I think it resonated in a way that was very like humanizing for her. And I think it was also like lovely to see that sort of candid moment with her with her child, that picture of her that was in that held the piece. I was very touched by her description. She said my life has been nothing ordinary about the way I've grown up. However, the experience of being completely panicked about having a child preterm is.

14:02And I thought that was a nice way to sort of frame that. I thought so, too. And then another big story this week was Teen Vogue's coup of having Vivian Wilson on the cover of Teen Vogue, Elon Musk's 20-year-old daughter. That story felt exactly right at the right moment. The interview is wild. Ellie Ureman met with her over several Zooms, and she really doesn't hold back the punches. And so I was really excited to see Teen Vogue have that big moment. Yeah, I mean, she's a hero to me. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us as ever. We love hearing the behind the scenes of the fantasy football switch-ups in the fashion world.

14:49Thanks for having me. We will be back in a moment with Penelope Tree and my colleague Julia Hobbs.

15:04Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford, senior awards correspondent at Vanity Fair and co-host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood. There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated. Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.

15:45Hi, Penelope. Hi, Shoma. Yeah, welcome to the show. And we're so excited about your piece. and it was such a great addition to the vintage issue. It's one of my favourites. I know Julia commissioned this piece and I would love for you two to talk about how it came together. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. Thrilled that you like the piece. There's actually quite a good story on how Penelope and I met. Oh really? You have to tell it. So we actually met backstage at the Oxfam fashion show which everybody's wearing pieces that have been thrifted. And Penelope's standing behind me wearing this yellow rain mack with the hood up.

16:30And I was wearing the banana t-shirt which was originally styled in British Vogue. The first ever fashion shoot that British Vogue did which was all thrifted clothes styled by Bay Garnett. And so, yeah, I pinched her t-shirt basically and Penelope was behind me. and I actually was incredibly starstruck, Penelope. Oh, please. I was. I know you're going to hate this. I was. But I said, would you consider writing for Vogue? And you said, yeah, I would love to do a designer interview and I sort of took that away. And when Chioma was asking for ideas for this vintage-themed issue which is a subject so close to your heart, so close to my heart, I thought of you.

17:16and as someone who could take us back to a place. Who is vintage. Not true. Who's an icon. Who could take us back to this moment where vintage as we know it and the cult and the culture around wearing vintage clothes was born, Penelope, which was 1967 or 1963. Do you want to take us back there? Okay. Well, I grew up in New York, but my parents came to London every June and July, and I used to come with them. And they had a very social life going on, so I was left a lot to my own devices. I had another friend who was in the same situation. So we lived close to the King's Road and we'd go out and obviously the Beatles had just burst onto the scene and we were completely Beatle maniacs.

18:16And as a couple of summers rolled by, pretty much everybody under 40 or 50, all the women were wearing these very short skirts and strappy shoes. And, you know, they had long straight hair and looked like Patty Boyd or, you know, Julie Christie or tried to. Anyway, that was cool. And we wanted desperately to be like them. And so, you know, as we got a bit older, we started going to Biba. And that was a complete and utter thrill as well, because you could buy an entire Biba outfit for five pounds in those days. Oh, my God. Wow. You know, yeah, including a feather boa. Can't relate, Penelope. No.

19:07So then in 1967, I came over to London because I had a summer job in a publishing company. And for the first time, I stayed in a kind of B &B in Park Street, Chelsea. And I had a very kind of like upright, fastidious landlady who kind of looked at me in horror as I went out the door in these very short skirts. and, you know, painted on eyelashes. Yeah, where did that come, where did it get the idea from? Because it became such a signature for you and I just think it's such a strong beauty signature. I think I just wanted to make my eyes look huge and so it was just a way of doing that. And I think, you know, people were doing it at the time.

19:57I don't think I invented it, I'm afraid, but I think I exaggerated it a bit And that's the way I went to the office in the morning, this very fusty old office. And I went down the King's Road on a 22 bus every morning and came back every evening. And I started to see in the summer of 1967 that the really cool kids on the street were not so much wearing dolly with sort of the whole mod look had kind of gone out the window. They were wearing a much more sort of layered romantic look, long skirts and lots of sort of shawls and fringes and beads and ruffled shirts. The men were all wearing kind of like military jackets with brass buttons and also these ruffly shirts and very tight velvet jeans in all kinds of different colors.

21:02So on Saturday morning, I started to kind of follow some of these kids to see where they were shopping and ended up in the Chelsea Antique Market on the King's Road. And this is where you take us for the story, which I love, because the thing about this piece is that we're so with you as a reader. We're there on the 22 bus with our eyelashes painted on, and you sort of got the scent of where this now legendary vintage dealer was trading from. And I think this is something today, Choma, you know, we love to look at vintage on Instagram and there's tons of vintage dealers, small and large, around.

21:48But really what this person, Vern Lambert, was doing at the Chelsea market was completely original in the times. Can you take us there? Tell us about him. So Vern Lambert seemed to me to be about sort of 55. In fact, he was probably in his late 20s. He was very shy and introverted, and he had two stalls in the Chelsea Antique Market. On the ground floor, he had a stall selling men's clothes, which were all these military jackets and ruffled shirts, sort of like Byron-esque shirts. But on the first floor, there was this cave-like grotto, which you could hardly get in the door because it was so full of clothes.

22:35everything that you can imagine from poiret, you know, from couture to, I don't know, American baseball jackets to, you know, things that really weren't being sold at the time. And Vern would be sitting on the floor with a huge garbage bag full of old clothes sorting through them. He never said a word to anybody, but he had two extremely flamboyant helpers, shop assistants, who never stopped talking and were in love with the clothes. And they dressed in the clothes as well. They looked amazing. This is where I followed all these different people who were buying clothes from Verne at the time, like Marianne Faithful and Brian Jones and, I don't know, Jimi Hendrix even I saw there once.

23:35That's a great sighting. Yeah, it was. The thing is, at the time, on the King's Road, everybody walked down the King's Road. Only the Beatles were too famous to walk down the King's Road. The Stones all were there. You know, Julie Christie and pretty much, you know, Michael Caine, everybody that you can think of who was sort of famous at the time were all gathered around and the Chelsea Antique Market was the hub. Do you remember any specific pieces that you bought from Verne or that you scored at the Chelsea Antiques Market that stand out in your mind? Well, he was very big on cut velvet. So I had this beautiful cut velvet jacket that went down to sort of below my knees and had fringes.

24:24And I absolutely loved that. It was in a kind of teal blue. And it was, I don't know what era it was from, but I loved it. And there were, I don't know, all sorts of things like fringed suede jackets. like cowboy jackets but with very deep fringes and wonderful beaded boleros I remember having a beaded bolero which went with everything and then these 40s biased cut sort of cocktail dress or rather sort of tea dresses that went below the knees and made out of beautiful material if they didn't quite fit the modern body which had changed a lot I guess since the 40s and 30s. He would upcycle. He had a wonderful eye and he really just knew how to do things.

25:21And, you know, the way he got the clothes was interesting too because he came from Melbourne and he started out sort of selling antiques and he had a big show or, you know, he had a show of wonderful glass vases in the King's Cross somewhere, some, you know, remote gallery, because the King's Cross was very remote in those days, believe it or not. That backwater of King's Cross. Yeah, it totally was. And so he had this exhibition, and just sort of as a last-minute thing, he discovered a trunk of beaded clothes from the 20s, beaded dresses from the 20s. And so he hung them up. I can't quite visualize this scene, but he hung them up and everybody went for the dresses and nobody bought the vases.

26:18But it's also quite interesting how he sourced the clothes because he had a network of what were then known as rag and bone men that went round the country knocking on the doors of stately homes and asking what was in the attic. And I loved you recounting this story within the piece because that's almost why the clothes was such a mixed bag. It was a bit of a military jacket, Edwardian. It might have been a 1920s cocktail dress because it was kind of thrifted as a bundle, a random assortment of clothes. And that's what defined this original bohemian era that London was the beating heart of. Exactly.

27:03And those rag and bone men used to go around, I know this makes me sound like I'm 400 years old, but they went around in carts with, you know, drawn by horses. So it's, you know, extraordinary to think. And they would say, rag and bone. Rag and bone. Rag and bone. But you've talked a little bit about the famous faces that would promenade on the King's Road. And of course, you, Penelope, were one of the faces that defined that decade and that style and many decades in style since. What was your big discovery moment when you burst onto the scene as this new face? Oh, well, I was really lucky enough to go to Truman Capote's famous now black and white ball in, I think it was 1966, and I was still 16.

27:59And I sort of knew what I wanted to wear, which was a dress that was based very much on ballet, modern ballet clothes. so I went to this new designer called Betsy Johnson who had just graduated from Pratt Institute she worked for this shop in New York fabulous shop called Paraphernalia which was the answer to be New York's answer to Biba and anyway she came up with this incredibly beautifully cut very naked black dress and somehow it caught the imagination of fashion writers there and it was just a fluke basically and I think it was partly because I went very simple and didn't wear any wore tons of makeup but didn't wear any jewelry or anything like that and most of the women went decked in, you know, sort of feathers and jewels and things like that.

29:02And so somebody who just went totally simple was noticeable. We have a beautiful image which runs with your story in the April issue, which is a photograph that David Bailey took of you, doll-like, in a beautiful bohemian dress. And we all fell in love with this picture. You worked so closely with Bailey, and there are so many pictures that you shared with me. I think we had five or six emails where it's all these different attachments of wonderful images from that moment in the 60s. Do you have a favorite picture or a favorite memory from shooting at that time with Bailey? Well, all I can say is that our relationship started in Vogue House in 1967 because I met Bea Miller, the editor-in-chief at a party, and she said, you know, she was quite sort of headmistress-like and rather scary.

29:59And she said, come in at lunchtime tomorrow. I'd like you to meet somebody. And so I went in at lunchtime and went into her office, which was pitch dark at the time. And she was going through, I guess, contact sheets or something. I don't know why it was pitch dark, but her assistant put on the light And there was Bailey sitting on the floor cross-legged looking at contact sheets. I just, we had one of those moments where everything changes and goes misty and goes electric and, you know, strange things happen. And so a few days later, I did a sitting with him. And he was quite frightening to work for because he was both very critical and very funny.

30:52at the same time. So I sort of felt like a frog on a, you know, being dissected in a biology class or something. But somehow we really clicked afterwards, because he was doing a shot on Procol Harum, and he'd sort of run out of ideas, and he's like, help me, help me. And so I sat on the floor. I don't know what I did, but anyway, it sort of worked. And I sort of knew that we had this sort of quite deep connection, but I was going back to university in America, and I knew that he was married, so I didn't sort of linger. And the next year, we got together, and I came to London to live with him. and your collaboration the work that came through that and it was a true collaboration because you know what you bring in front of the camera and your ideas who wouldn't think that well we're saying it now for the record too bad yeah too bad yeah he was very directive I mean I had been working a lot with Avedon in New York So when I went to the Black and White Ball, Avedon saw me and told Deanna Vreeland that he wanted to work with me, which was thrilling.