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Wearing vintage clothing is already a bit of a commitment, from dealing with delicate older materials to deciphering sizes based on outdated standards. Colleen Darnell takes that commitment a whole lot further by literally wearing vintage clothing every single day.
“It makes me feel powerful to be able to channel the past,” says Darnell. She’s an Egyptologist by profession, meaning she sometimes finds herself out in the field excavating dusty antiquities. But even then, she does so wearing cotton blouses, smart skirts, leather boots, and petite straw hats atop her razor-cut bobbed hair.
“My personal style is mostly 1920s flapper look,” she says, and she’s drawn to that era by what it meant for women; it was an empowering time when they could start moving in professional and social spaces that were previously closed off to them. The same went for fashion, including the loose flapper dresses Darnell wears today.
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