The first Vintage Fashion Week in Germany begins on Monday. The event is less like a conventional fashion week, but rather includes joint sales campaigns from various vintage dealers. The Vintage Fashion Week aims to motivate consumers to buy vintage and second-hand fashion and – as a positive side effect – to increase awareness of the participating retailers. The discount campaigns take place online as well as in the stationary sales outlets of the companies.
A total of twelve retailers are taking part in Vintage Fashion Week: Peeces, Vinokilo, Vintage & Rags, Zeitgeist, Heavin, Hotel Vintage, Heartlight, Ooak, Lastdecades, Juls Vintage, Truedat and Vinokilo. Together, the companies have almost 400,000 followers on Instagram.
Discount offers on bestseller segments and well-running brands are intended to mobilize new customers and convey the message that “clothing does not have to be produced from scratch to be of high quality,” as the online retailer Peeces writes on its website.
Michel Oldehaver, founder of the online retailer Zeitgeist, sees the Vintage Fashion Week as a contrast to the larger economic events in the fashion industry and to the actions of large trading houses, which are determined by competitive thoughts and a general opposition to each other. “The Vintage Fashion Week is a collaboration platform for all retailers who, in our opinion, go hand in hand with slow fashion and the benefits for fashion lovers as well as for people and the environment in general.”
Oldehaver describes the cooperation between the dealers as “essential” for the next few years. In the future, Vintage Fashion Week will continue to grow – Oldehaver informed FashionUnited about possibilities with events on site, such as upcycling workshops in partner cities.