The Cambridge Affordable Vintage Fair

This weekend was the Cambridge Affordable Vintage Fair!  I love it so much - I've been trying to get back to it since my first visit for the November event, but various life things have been getting in the way since then, so I was determined to get there this weekend.

I've really got into buying second hand and vintage the past couple of years, though I've always had a tendency to "inherit" clothes from family. There is near endless variety since you could find anything from the last 60 years and the quality is generally significantly better than what's new in the shops at the moment.  If it wasn't it wouldn't have survived to be second hand.

But on to the vintage fair.


The reason (if I needed one) for this particular outing was to find something to go with this dress:

It's a cute sixty's high neck thing with a lovely flare to the skirt given by the pleats.  It's vintage, but I actually got it off eBay (it even came with the original hanger!).  It's made of a really strange canvas-y stuff, but fully lined so it's comfy to wear.  Unfortunately I'm very fair skinned and it's sleeveless, so in the summer I'm going to need something to throw over to cover my arms if I start to get crispy.  It came with a jacket...

...but yeah - not overly helpful and, to be honest, I look daft in it.  The problem is the dress is high necked, so my go to solution of "throw a shirt over it" doesn't work.  But the weather was gorgeous, so I put on the dress and off to the fair I went!

I could spend a loooooooot of money there.  Take a look at these photos of the day.  That's only a tiny part of it.  I was worried my first time that "affordable" was going to be a bit optimistic, but actually it really is.  Some of the shirts and other tops I was looking at I would expect to pay a minimum of £25-£30 for in the shops (not that you could find anything quite like these at the shops), but were going for around £15 at the fair.

I was surprised the first time I went to find that a lot of men go too, and there's a lot of menswear on sale. It's by no means 50/50, but maybe 60/40 women/men who were there.  I had assumed something quite so fashion oriented as a vintage fair would be a fairly female preserve, but it makes sense.  Menswear in the shops at the moment is pretty dull unless you're into very particular sub-cultures. Very much the same selection of shirts and trousers over and over again in slightly different colours, whereas the fair has pretty much anything you can think of from the fifties onwards...as long as you don't want trousers. I've never seen a pair of trousers (men's or women's) at this vintage fair, but no one seemed to mind.

But I had my own mission!  Which kinda failed.  I didn't find anything to go over my dress.  On the other hand I did find this gorgeous wrap skirt.

The photo doesn't do the colour justice - it's really rich and vibrant.  I wore it to Vicki Dalton's birthday shenanigans yesterday and decided that it's a little too long.  Also, because it's a wrap skirt, I fear every gust of wind is going to blow it open, but that's easily fixed.  I'll sew up the side, fold over the top for an elastic casing and it'll be a perfect maxi skirt.  I'll post the final result once it's done.