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Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics

Gracious living that's light on the earth

You are here: Home / Fabric / The Top 5 Reasons Why Vintage Fabrics are Best for All Your Projects

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The Top 5 Reasons Why Vintage Fabrics are Best for All Your Projects

Vintage 1960s House ‘N Home Indienne Fabric.

In May I had the delight to move my online cottage industry vintage fabric shop from my cottage (actually, from my Newtown neighborhood Staunton, Virginia house) to a showroom in a gorgeous 1890s building in Staunton’s downtown shopping district.

Just as soon as I’ve gotten that completely organized I’ll blog about the new space and what it means for you.

For now, suffice it to say that moving everything in and sorting all the fabrics made me look again on all the vintage fabric I’ve curated and see anew how each piece was chosen with love and passion.

The variety is a big part of the fun. A 1940s lush tropical barkcloth. A 1950s Scalamandré upholstery fabric. A 1960s kitschy floral linen. A 1970s Marcia Brady-style polyester. Pieces from the traditional chintz revival of the 1980s. All of these fabrics — and 1,000s more — were chosen for their unique or beautiful or compelling or interesting qualities so that I could bring them to you, my dear customers.

As I was standing in my new showroom this week and musing over this love I got inspired to share my top five reasons for collecting and selling antique and vintage fabrics. Since I know how many of you also suffer from the delightful malady of fabric addiction, I hope you’ll enjoy!

The Reader’s Digest version is:

  • Sustainability
  • Preservation
  • Personal Stories
  • One-of-a-Kind Finds
  • Quality

But read on as I dig into the details…

#5: Sustainability

With my complete devotion to Creation Care, environmentalism, and sustainability you’d think I’d make this the #1 reason to use 20-year-old and older fabrics instead of some fresh off of Spoonflower’s unsustainable presses, or newly introduced to the showrooms of the great fabric houses.

But I know that it’s still a hard sell in our culture to lift re-use practices to the center of our values system. There’s so many forces arrayed against the understanding that our precious human lives are imperiled by our rapacious stripping of earth’s bounty, which is exactly what’s customary in manufacturing all but the “slow fabrics,” that is those grown organically, by hand, with minimal processing, and then handwoven, and handsewn.

From cheap fossil fuels and their corporate pushers to the insidious practices of Mad Men-like advertising to issues of status and fast fashion and more, there’s little shared understanding of — and even less commitment to — the imperative to collectively slow down consumption and then re-think and re-do everything we’ve gotten used to since industrialization.

Sadly, “endless growth” retains its iron grip as the largely unquestioned paradigm of our time. Meanwhile, a salvage economy, which can provide all sorts of economic growth and balance along with other benefits, remains a quaint notion to those indifferent to systems thinking about our world.

In spite of all this opposition, again and again I raise my voice to champion the ideals of at least a partial salvage economy, including, in my case, the arena of vintage or deadstock fabrics.

When we source the trillions plus yards of unused fabrics and textiles to re-envision and re-use them in new projects, we’re practicing, in my view, a sacred act that celebrates existing abundance. With vintage fabrics, we’re not asking a single new thing out of soil, fossil fuels, chemicals, water, trees and other plant matter. And we’re intentionally sending a no-new demand signal to the industrial economy.

Is this a pitiful drop in the bucket that’s so naïve that we’d be laughed out of the best cocktail parties? Perhaps. But even Martha Stewart, though many of her new home, office, and craft products have been built by the industrial economy, still reserves a huge share of her publications and presentations to valuing and re-using beautiful goods from the past. And I bet she’s at some pretty swanky cocktail parties!

I will never stop imagining and advocating for a culture where we value and care about our world even as we necessarily use its resources to fashion our shared lives. And to that end, there’s no single more sustainable fabric choice for any project you ever do than re-using the baked in energy and resources of vintage and antique fabrics (again, except the slowest of slow fiber). It is the #1 undisputed greenest choice of all in using fabric and textiles today.

And I could mic drop with that. But let’s look at four other great reasons to use vintage fabrics.

#4: Preservation

A close cousin to sustainability, preservation has the added connection to history.

What are these fabrics? Why were they fashionable at this time or that? What were their designers and manufacturers trying to do in making certain pieces? And why do we want or need to preserve them?

Fabrics and textiles are rife with references to the past, as well as signals of their time. Some of the fabrics in my available collection were reproduced as “document pieces” to capture a remnant of wallpaper or fabric found at an ancient or antique site or discovered remaining on a piece of furniture or clothing.

Fabric Houses like Greeff, Scalamandré, Brunschwig & Fils and more intentionally sought to get these down — and sometimes riffed on the designs in new ways — so that we might retain that connection to historic design sensibilities and be inspired by the beauty and inventiveness of the past.

Vintage fabrics by their very nature capture those snapshots in time. They can be grand examples, like the Chinoiseries and floral Indiennes of the 18th century. But they can be everyday examples like early Soviet-era textiles that focused on the inherent nobility of the worker or the space-age longings and atomic fears found in American fabrics of the 1940s-early 1960s.

We get to draw on and connect to history, to the ancestors and all who came before us, when we choose vintage fabrics. I love that!

#3: Individual Stories

The scope of historic preservation gets intimate when we look at individual stories connected to fabrics.

In just the two years that I’ve had Lady Virginia Vintage, numerous customers have shared the story of a piece of fabric they bought from my shop. They’ve included:

  • Repairing a tattered baby blanket from the 1970s with its exact fabric found in my shop.
  • Honoring a family member who was a 20th century fabric designer.
  • Launching a mask line during covid with fabrics that expressed a certain ethereal beauty.
  • Restoring a camper’s curtains with the original upholstery fabric using fabric from my shop.
  • Sourcing Stroheim and Romann fabrics, the go-to brand of a deceased relative, to update her inherited lake house.
  • Making a reproduction 1930s era skirt with a border print piece.
  • Eden Saalsaa launching an entirely upcycled vintage fabric pillow line — Olden Vintage — to begin her California-based business.
  • And so many more…

As I wrote in my review of the book The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, we’re all drawn to fabrics and textiles. We all have memories associated with them. We wear them, sleep under them, decorate with them, have aversions and preferences related to their feel, styles, and associations.

Vintage fabric designs, weaves, and textures all arouse our memories for fond things, places, people, and times. It’s built into the…fabric of the pieces! There’s a richness in there that speaks to the human heart.

Even if your quest isn’t about finding a replacement fabric for one you long to repair, there’s still a host of stories, feelings, nostalgia, and longing sparked by every vintage and antique piece out there.

We always do all the research we can on any given fabric or textile at Lady Virginia Vintage. That gives you a story to tell when you’re attracted to a piece and buy it for your project. It’s so rewarding when someone compliments your bespoke clothing or re-covered chairs for you to be able to talk a little bit about where the fabric came from, its era and even makers, and how the period works with your project!

#2: One-of-A-Kind Style

Some of us can only be happy when we’re on-trend, steeped in the up-to-the-minute styles of the times. Of course, that’s also the curse of fast fashion in clothing and interiors, and its horrific impact on climate, pollution, and waste that I talked about above.

And that’s just not for me.

Others of us either want totally unique finds, our own personal expression, or to interpret trends with our own twists. Vintage fabrics allow us to do all of this and more.

Now I’m not saying that no one will ever have the same vintage fabric as you. But the odds sure are lower with vintage than when scooping up whatever is being churned out by the huge-scale fabric houses or shown in the fabric shops today.

To me there’s nothing more exciting than when we can source very old vintage fabric in so many yards that you could re-cover a couch or make floor length curtains, like with this amazing handprinted 1950s Brunschwig and Fils “French Gladiola” yardage I recently sourced, or this stunning 1960s David and Dash abstract modern linen called “Agate” that we acquired in 19 yards! With that much yardage, they make projects for the ages come to life.

But even smaller pieces, like our well documented collection of vintage fabric samples from top 20th century designers allow you to make smaller projects, like some great pillows, a Roman shade, portions of a quilt, a message board and more without having to go through gatekeepers in the “to the trade” hierarchy. These 30- 40- 50-year and older pieces are also highly unlikely to be found in anyone else’s decor. The odds are just against it.

That means with vintage fabric you really can stand apart in your personal expression and be the design maven of your dreams!

  • Vintage Brunschwig & Fils Fabric
    1979 Brunschwig & Fils Royal Garden Fabric.
  • Vintage Bloomcraft Fabric
    Vintage Bloomcraft Tulip Chintz Fabric.
  • Vintage Scalamandré Fabric
    1966 Scalamandré Floral Striped Fabric Sample.
  • Vintage Kravet Fabrics
    1980s Kravet Regal Kyoto Chinoiserie Upholstery Fabric.
  • Vintage Waverly Fabrics
    Waverly Lymington Fabric, an Indienne.
  • Vintage Greeff Fabrics
    1970s Hamza's Pavilion Fabric.
  • 1966GreeffRegattaFabricSample
  • Vintage David and Dash fabric
    David and Dash "Karate" fabric.
  • Vintage Boris Kroll Fabrics
    Vintage 1960s Boris Kroll "Rima" Fabric Sample.

# 1: Quality and Value

Like so many things in our world, the quality of fabric in the age of fast fashion, fast interiors, and fast production has declined dramatically. Cranking textiles out at breakneck speed to meet forced and seasonal trends driven more by forced economic growth than true style has led to a decline in quality across fiber, weave, inks, and printing techniques.

There’s a belief that clothing will be worn only seven times before it’s chucked out, and that few will bother with restoring an old couch or chairs when they can just hit Pottery Barn up every half decade or so for the latest cheap furniture that looks so must-have.

Buying top quality new fabrics for clothing and interiors is possible, and it is expensive. Slow fiber, fabric, and clothing could re-employ huge numbers of workers while stepping more lightly on the earth. Yet for now, this fabric is so rare that it’s out of reach for most consumers.

Couture fabric for body and home also remains hugely expensive and comes with eco-degradation.

The best-cared-for, researched, and presented vintage fabrics aren’t cheap either. But typically they do cost less than new yardage from top-of-the-line brands while retaining the quality found in earlier eras of threads and yarns, hand weaving, luxurious hand printing, better inks, tighter weaves, and better hands — or the feel — of the fabric.

I choose all the fabrics for Lady Virginia Vintage from a love of their unique features and designs. Just as passionately, I’m drawn to their higher quality fiber, that Je ne sais quoi of the past where it’s evident that this was just made better. Properly bringing that to market isn’t cheap, but an investment in these fabrics is worth it across so many fronts.

I love knowing that my pieces have that richness of materials and techniques that made them this long lasting in the first place, and ensure their use for many years to come. (Okay, the 197os polyesters not as much, but you gotta love those crazy Partridge Family-era designs!)

I Love Vintage Fabrics!

There they are — my top reasons for loving vintage fabrics. It’s what gets me excited for each new day of sourcing, researching, writing about, and sending off my personally curated collection of these amazing finds for your projects.

Why do you love vintage fabrics? I’d love to hear your comments below!

In the meantime, if you see a fabric you love, be sure to snap it up before it’s gone. Most of our selection is out of print, and over 95% of our finds are one-of-a-kind on the market right now. When they’re gone they’re gone!

— Lady Virginia (Lindsay Curren), Lady Virginia Vintage

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About Lindsay Curren

A Christian, mama, and writer, Lindsay Curren (aka Lady Virginia) is also a passionate lifelong collector of vintage fabrics. "There's something inexplicable about the pull textiles have on me. I simply can't resist sourcing them, using them, and now selling them. Other fabric addicts will understand!"

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A Christian, mama, and writer, Lindsay Curren (aka Lady Virginia) is also a passionate lifelong collector of vintage fabrics. "There's something inexplicable about the pull textiles have on me. I simply can't resist sourcing them, using them, and now selling them. Other fabric addicts will understand!"

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Come enjoy the #vintagefabriclove during our #cybe Come enjoy the #vintagefabriclove during our #cybermondaysale with 15-30 % off AND today only an extra $5 off that @etsy is throwing in for orders over $30 AND free shipping in the US on orders over $35.

We have over 500 #vintagefabrics listed — come find your dream piece. Find us at Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics on #etsy (link in bio).

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Just listed and one of my faves! RARE! This gor Just listed and one of my faves!

RARE! 

This gorgeous unglazed, handprinted fabric reveals the wilder, untamed side of the 1950s — a lush, expressive, daring, and edgy floral starring lilacs and anemones spiked by dark, encroaching ivy and twisty branches.

A great piece for framed fabric art. Also perfect for true Mid Century modernist floral design — use as pillow fronts, a statement-making large lampshade, a small café curtain or fabric-covered screen, as an ottoman top. Lightweight enough to be worked into a garment. 

A rare find, this is 100% hand printed mid 1950s Jofa. Interestingly the piece is titled "Lilas." I suspect this was a printing mistake and that it was actually called Lilac.

COLORS: On an ivory white background are baby pink, raspberry, Maraschino cherry orchid, plum, olive, and dark chocolate.

FIBER: 100% cotton. Gorgeous tight weave with a smooth hand with an old school polished cotton feel. 

SIZE: 49" wide x 37" L. $169 w/ free shipping in the USA. On sale for 15% off through November 30th. 

Find it in our Etsy shop Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics (link in bio). 

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New listing. The perfect gift for a Civil Ware er New listing.

The perfect gift for a Civil Ware era re-enactor or lover of the Romantic Hoop Skirt Era. This quilt appears to be from roughly the 1930s and is a combination of machine and hand sewn.

Features charming vignettes of hoop skirt clad ladies walking or relaxing under a tree, a woman playing a piano, and a courting couple walking in the sun, she with a parasol, and another courting couple walking, too. 

Take note, the individual squares DO NOT indicate a pieces quilt. It IS pieced, but not by the square but by the panel. The squares are part of a print.

SIZE: 65" wide x 72" long.

$259 and free shipping in the USA. On sale for 15% off through November 30th. 

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RARE! This Mid Century (1960s) S. M. Hexter Comp RARE! 

This Mid Century (1960s) S. M. Hexter Company fabric is titled "Goa," presumabky in reference to the Indian region of Konkan.

A heavier weight linen/cotton blend with a weave akin to a heavy, nubbly, tea towel. The background is a geometric tribal style with circular medallions that include a bird, insects, stylized leaves, flowers, and feathers. 

Hand printed! 

NOTE: If using the piece for, say, circular pillow fronts or heavy weight quilt motifs, ONLY the three motifs on the left hand side are full circles. The three on the right, while usable in other creative ways, do not extend to the full circle. 

$95 w/ free shipping in the USA and on sale through November 30th for 15% off. 

Find it in our Etsy shop Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics (link in bio).

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Absolutely beautiful and just listed! Gorgeous a Absolutely beautiful and just listed! 

Gorgeous and luminescent vintage silk dupioni in timeless and enduring pinks. Even Barbie would approve. The light filled silk lends a subtle silvery sheen. 

Up to three continuous yards available make it possible to do a small set of café curtains, pillows, lampshades, or re-cover a dining chair set. Luxe for a Baby shower table runner, girl mom pillow, or baby girl nursery decor. Also usable for garment weight projects — this would make many stunning clothing items: a sheath dress, party skirt, cropped jacket, pencil pants, and more!

Perfect for a preppy-leaning grandmillennial application, also traditional style decor, and colonial-era American style upholstery, among other uses.

Light to medium-light weight.

SIZE: 55" wide x 1 yard increments with up to 3 yards available. $49/yd w/ free shipping in the USA. On sale through November 30th for 15% off. 

Find it in our Etsy shop Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics (link in bio).

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This stunning "Tree" piece by Bassett McNab offers This stunning "Tree" piece by Bassett McNab offers two centrally placed tree motifs that would work great on pillows or for a simple one-window application. A vintage fabric sample. 

If using on a quilt take note that this is a heavier weight cotton linen piece, NOT quilting weight fabric.

A gorgeous flowering tree is surrounded by a woodland of sweet flowers. Reminiscent of a folktale! Perfect for everything from grandmillennial to gorpcore to cottage core and more!

COLORS: On an emerald green background are avocado, ivory, khaki, cranberry, tomato red, burnt orange, and Wedgewood blue.

SIZE: 27" wide x 45" long. $89/ w/ free shipping in the USA. In our sale for 15% off through November 30th. 

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Inspired by Indonesian wax batik, this screenprint Inspired by Indonesian wax batik, this screenprinted House N' Home interior fabric from 1979 offers all that detailed flair and more. Lush foliage and flowers combine in a night-like landscape of richly detailed and energeticlaly charged flora.

Wonderful for exotic, naturalist, gorpcore, Tiki, and internationally themed rooms for pillows, small café curtains, lampshades, pillows, re-doing dining chair seats, for a message board, or to craft an ottoman or fabric-covered coffee table, and more. Stretch over a frame for fabric art. If using for a garment — maybe a skirt or jacket — it will be stiff, structured, and a little heavier weight.

1 yard + a connected 34” available (or purchase separately). $65-69 ea. Find them in our Ets shop Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics (link in bio). 

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We found more P Kaufmann Sultan’s Walk in our st We found more P Kaufmann Sultan’s Walk in our stash, this time in the brown colorway.

Charming and engaging, this 21st century upholstery fabric titled "Sultan's Walk" features a fantastical Indienne style landscape of curving branches, oversized blossoms, and fruits as the background for playful monkeys, a painted elephant with a colorful saddle, a roaming crocodile, and a nomads decorative tent. 

Great for seat cushions, pillows, small café curtains, valances, big tubular lampshade, totes, and more! Would make a wonderful fabric-covered headboard for a child's room.

SIZE: 54" w X 1 yard continuous uncut increments (sold by the yard). Up to 3yards available. $89/yard and on sale for 15% off through November 30th with free shipping in the US. 

Find it in our Etsy shop Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics (link in bio). 

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Six matching chintz #vintagefabricsamples — the Six matching chintz #vintagefabricsamples — the perfect grandmillennial set.

Payne's 1980s "Aubergine" #9164 is available in six colorways for creating an eclectic dining chair set (or other collections. Each sold separately (one just slightly damaged).

Features a solid background exploding with sumptuous peony- and camelia-like flowers and buds along with expressive vining and toothy foliage. Perfect for a grandmillennial application — make crisp oversized clutches, tote fronts with contrasting backs, cover chair seats, make pillow fronts, and more!

Perfect for bringing a vibrant garden feel to any space or a floral punch to any bag/tote/project. 

Each 27” w X 33” long and $39/ each — on sale 15% off during Etsy’s Cyber Month sale. Find them in our Etsy shop Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics (link in bio). 

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Unique Vintage 1960s Jockey Fabric BTY. What a f Unique Vintage 1960s Jockey Fabric BTY. 

What a fun piece for the equestrian collector or horse racing fan! Up to three continuous yards available (sold BY THE YARD) for use in making a tailgating tablecloth, table runner, or napkins; or pillows or small cafè curtains for your horse-themed den, suite, or AirBnB. Light weight enough for a camp shirt, or line with interfacing for totes in polo or horse racing country.

Features colorful geometric and polka-dotted racing silks, stylized jodhpurs, paddock- and horse racing boots, helmets, saddles, and arm numbers. 

$59/yard and on sale now through November 30th in our shop-wide sale. FREE shipping in the US. 

Find it in our Etsy shop Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics (link in bio). 

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