Interior Design vs. Decor. Vintage vs. Retro. Have you ever thought of how certain words seem to creep up and overtake others in our collective vernacular? When people talk about design, it seems as though the vocabulary used evolves along with the gen…

In the textile re-work business, the word “vintage” is interesting. We re-work and re-sell vintage and antique textiles, and we have to be accurate about it. Third-party reselling sites like eBay and Etsy have specific guidelines for antique and vintage, and sites like these seem to be setting word usage at the moment. Vintage is usually 20+ years old, so anything 50s, 60s, 70s and now 80s would be vintage. Products from the 1990s aren’t really vintage yet. In short, anything the thrift-shop hipster crowd is wearing is vintage. On eBay, antique is 100 years old +. Retro is more complicated because it can refer to the past without actually being old itself, and nobody has any strict guidelines for that. Incidentally to my ears “retro” always immediately brings up an image of the 50s, but I know other people use it to suggest the 60s. Anyway, what that graph shows is what you’re pointing out, the broad usefulness of the term vintage – fashion, decor, wine, cars. We really wanted to run comparisons of references to the different decades – mentions of the 60s, 70s and 80s – but these showed nothing except changing usages of the term (seventies, 1970s, 70s, with the first and last terms also referring to the age group of people in their seventies). We ended up with data that didn’t look like anything. But we’re not social scientists! These graphs are the most casual, winging-it sort of research…

Interior designers have to have a professional qualification to function, while an interior decorator does not. The pecking order firmly places an architect first, followed by an interior designer, with an interior decorator coming a poor third.

This is not neccessarily fair but neither is it fair to think of a professional interior designer as a decorator, but I can also understand why a decorator would want to be more firmly associated and aligned with the interior design profession rather than painting and decorating.

A word of warning though, be careful when you bring the subject up with a true interior designer, they tend not to be that tolerant about the fudging of their job title with interior decoration!

Vintage and retro are two interesting terms. Vintage, although not ‘antique’ seems closer to that term than ‘retro’, and is closely associated with wine, for example. Both terms do not technically mean anything as both can be used to denote that something is of a vintage or retro ’style’ but still brand new. However, retro has become associated with a younger audience and their interest in the popular culture side of twentieth century collecting.

I suppose some of the changes in labelling have something to do with the media having to re-access its readership base, different terms for a different generation perhaps. There is also an element of beefing up decor to the professional level of interior design. Perhaps the media have been tweaking with words to change their own appearance and cachet.