Vintage Style Without Vintage Values Is Just A Costume

Over time, I’ve noticed that a lot of these creators feel the very pressing need to make it clear to their audiences that their affection for vintage fashion is only skin-deep.

Maybe you’ve seen it too. Sooner or later, most of the accounts I follow post reels with a cheeky or downright bold message stating that they believe in #VintageStyleNotVintageValues; that they might embrace corsets, petticoats, and dreamy midcentury curls, but that’s exactly where their affinity for the old-school ends.

Now, they’re perfectly free to dress how they please and post what they want, to be clear.

All the same, I can’t help but notice that the reason vintage fashion is so appealing in our present day and age is not disconnected from the values of a previous day.

Can vintage style really be separated from vintage values?

I don’t believe they can.

In reality, aesthetics are intricately linked to beliefs, and the grace and femininity of vintage styles were not random flukes of the fashion industry.

They reflected a culture that, starkly contrasted to our own, saw beauty as an objective good and human dignity as something to honor, rather than objectify, distort, or degrade.

The Hashtag That Exposes the Cultural Confusion

Vintage stylist and writer Rebekka Laurel, who is not ashamed to share the “vintage values” that go along with her love for antique looks, has, for her part, watched the spread of the #VintageStyleNotVintageValues hashtag with concern.

She notes that it’s almost become a form of virtue signaling in the niche to distinguish oneself as a creator whose old-fashioned style only goes as deep as one’s antique knickers.

“The hashtag has become an over-simplified demonstration of fear that others will assume they’re racist or sexist just because they wear their grandmother’s clothes,” she told me.

“I find this ironic—as the vintage influencer space immerses itself in the lives, culture, and clothing of the people they are so desperately trying to distance themselves from.”

She makes an incredibly potent point, as the hashtag ends up denying the very virtues that made vintage fashion so beautiful: craftsmanship, dignity, order, and objective beauty.

Beauty, Truth, and the Culture That Shaped Elegance

Fashion designer and cultural commentator Julia James Davis, the voice behind the Instagram account The War on Beauty, has built her platform around one thesis: that beauty, truth, and goodness are inseparable—and that the modern world’s assault on beauty reflects a much deeper moral decay than the embrace of sweatpants and sad beige.

As the self-described “aesthetic evangelist” writes, beauty with “a higher purpose—one of truth and goodness—is under attack in the West.”

“Ugliness reflects lies and evil. Just as beauty reflects truth and goodness,” she explains in another post. “So by destroying beauty standards we have not created fairness; we have cut the moorings of the human person.”

Her argument mirrors what vintage fashion once embodied: that beauty is moral, not arbitrary. The cinched waists, gloves, and fine tailoring of mid-century style were outward expressions of inward order. They dignified the female body rather than commodifying it and flattered its natural design rather than forcing it into cheap, ill-fitting fast fashion and passing, edgy trends.

Vintage creators inherently embrace these values whether they realize it or not, because fashion, like actions, speaks louder than words.

Elegance as Inheritance

For Julia Virginia, a Georgia-born creator who grew up surrounded by big-band music and old Hollywood films, vintage style is inherently linked to old-world values and grace.

“My grandmother was one of the most stylish and graceful women I’ve ever known,” she told me of a woman who was not merely a fashion icon, but a model of morality and virtue.

Julia told me how the older woman’s presence was calm, deliberate, and warm, and that her lovely wardrobe and manner of dress were simply the extension of that interior order. To her, beauty was a form of stewardship.

“It wasn’t just the clothes, but the way women of that era embodied elegance inside and out,” she explains.

This insight strikes at the heart of why vintage aesthetics resonate today. Elegance wasn’t a performance; it was a reflection of character.

As for the “vintage values” that are more controversial, Julia adds, “Racism isn’t a ‘vintage value’—it’s a toxic mindset. There are countless vintage values we should reintroduce and hold onto in today’s world.”

This is a powerful and potent point. The past wasn’t perfect, but its moral failings don’t represent the overall values. Modesty, civility, and dignity are timeless.

The Feminist Break and the Loss of Dignity

Both of these women point to the same cultural rupture that followed the mid-20th century.

“Once the feminist movement took place, everything truly went downhill,” Julia Virginia told me. “The care and intention that went into personal style started to fade.”

Rebekka agrees, connecting that shift to the sexual revolution and the decline of shared moral standards surrounding sexuality, femininity, and personal dignity.

“Pre-1960s, people cared more about appropriateness and respectability because our lives revolved around our communities, our churches, and acceptance into local groups. Dignity wasn’t subjective.”

This can’t be overstated enough, and it is the values of the sexual revolution that the #VintageStyleNotVintageValues crowd wants to make clear it still maintains. This has become the Right Think of our era, and these are values that maintain that beauty is subjective, even sometimes suspect.

In rejecting poise and personal restraint as oppressive, modern culture reduced fashion to comfort and subjective self-expression. In the process, it lost the quiet discipline that once held civilization, and carefully set curls, together.

The Cultural Cost

Rebekka notes that the consequences of this cultural rupture are ubiquitous.

“People choose comfort over presentability, individualism over appropriateness, and it creates a strange atmosphere where people feel disconnected,” she said. “There are no standards for what is beautiful or correct, and we are suffering as a society because of this confusion.”

Julia Virginia senses the same hunger for meaning beneath the chaos.

“There’s a real craving for these values to become the norm again,” she told me. “People are hungry for this message.”

That longing isn’t mere nostalgia. It’s a recognition of what’s been lost. It’s a quiet protest against the ugliness and disorder that follow when beauty is treated as irrelevant.

The Real Meaning of Beauty

By embracing timeless beauty, we embrace something much higher than style.

Julia James Davis puts it in theological terms: “Beauty is the footprint of God’s presence in the world; to ignore beauty is to ignore God’s voice.”

If beauty reveals truth and goodness, then vintage fashion wasn’t just an aesthetic; it was an embodied moral vision. Its elegance pointed to a worldview that believed in hierarchy, harmony, and the inherent dignity of the human person.

We can’t simply borrow the silhouette and reject the spirit. The grace of vintage fashion was born of humility, reverence, and order—values that honored both body and soul.

Our grandmothers understood something we’ve forgotten: that beauty civilizes. When they dressed with care, they weren’t performing for men or repressing their true nature.

They were performing a simple but powerful practice of reverence—reverence for their own inherent dignity, reverence for others, reverence for something bigger than themselves.

There’s a reason we’re all nostalgic for this kind of beauty.