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I’m not nostalgic. I don’t miss the days of my childhood, teens, or young adulthood.

I don’t love vintage because I long for white picket fences or white supremacy. For everything that’s terrible about the world now, there’s a tonne that’s improved. The past is mostly not a good place for indigenous people, people of colour, most white women.

There are indigenous TV programs on Australian TV. Representation is better in Australia and the USA than it’s ever been. (It’s a very low bar though.)

Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby are in jail. Me too is a thing. Thank you, Tarana Burke, and so many other courageous women.

There are racist, misogynist, climate change denying, (wannabe) autocrats in power in too many places. White people still live longest and have the most wealth and power. Indigenous resistance struggles like the tremendous #ShutDownCanada movement is barely covered in the mainstream media. The world is still shit. Just not as shit.

I wear thirties clothes because I love the lines, colours, patterns–not because I’m hot for fascism.

I wear fifties sundresses because they’re comfy, flattering and gorgeous–not because I wish to be a modest Stepford wife. I don’t long for men to be men and women women. Whatever that means.

Like Alok Vaid-Menon, I know there are many more than two genders. I’ve known folks who were neither male nor female since I was little. I wrote my PhD about the absurd reductiveness of the binary.

#VintageStyleNotVintageValues sums up my vintage aesthetics: beauty, glamour, joy, and dresses for whoever wants them.

I will continue dressing up most days, even through this time of COVID-19 and social distancing, because that is who I am.

Wear what you want. Wherever you want. Whenever you want. (Unless it’s harmful.) It’s what Emma Goldman would have wanted.

(Except espadrilles because ewww! Don’t @ me.)