My love affair with charity shops began when I was seven and my Great Aunt began running the local charity shop.
The history and mystery of second hand shops was intoxicating to me. I love them so much that my most recurring (and exciting) dream involves me finding a charity shop full of fabulous vintage clothes.
My passion for charity shops taught me about history, culture, fabrics and quality. I love the items from long ago not just for their beauty, but for the quality, quirkiness, and history.
I was about 19 when I first bought a vintage pinny.
A selection of Taryn’s pinnies.
I’d grown up around women who wore them, both my grannies owned several, and I’ve bought many similar to the ones they owned in the years since.
Pinnies are an extra joy find for me as, unlike other clothing, most aprons are unique, homemade and handmade.
The owner often designed and created them herself, out of scraps from curtains, sheets and other bits of fabric.
My collection spans pinnies from the early 1900s to the late 1990s.
Each pinny is imprinted with the energy of the creator. I have one made around 1910, it is almost sheer white lawn, hand stitched with tiny pink ribbon rosettes.
I imagine a young romantic woman, lovingly hand sewing it using tiny, precise stitches.
Another favourite is a pink paisley print, probably from the late 1930s or early 1940s. It’s faded and worn around the belly area, as if the woman who wore it wiped her wet hands there over and over. I see her in my imagination, her hair held back in a snood, her work-hardened hands kneading bread.
What pleasure did she take in wearing a colourful pinny? Was it the most colourful clothing she owned?
The collection spans pinnies from the early 1900s to the late 1990s.
The pinnies I own were worn by women and women only.
They were only ever worn in the house, for the most part only seen by the people who knew the woman best.
This makes the care and detail of the handmade pinnies even more special to me.
Women spent hours embroidering flowers and cross stitching designs on their aprons, and they were doing it for themselves.
Not to meet societal expectations of women’s appearances, but to express themselves through colour, craft and artistry.
I believe that the pinnies bought them joy.
The colours of some of the aprons are so startling, combinations of electric blue and yellow, or pink and orange – the colours are not those we imagine housewives wearing, and yet this is what they chose when they knew no one would be watching or judging them.
There’s something beautiful about that.
Taryn sees pinnies not as symbols of domesticity but as subversive feminist art.
The creators of the aprons expressed parts of their identity through their pinnies, parts that they were not allowed to or discouraged from expressing outside of their own homes.
These aprons were declarations of independence and self worth by women who were oppressed and suppressed in most other parts of their lives. I see pinnies not as symbols of domesticity but as subversive feminist art.
I live in a different world from the one the women who made my pinnies lived in.
I can express myself any number of ways, and I have the freedom to not care what someone thinks if I wear an electric blue and hot pink outfit.
But to honour the women whose art I now own, I sometimes wear their pinnies during the day, as outerwear.
And sometimes I sit with my collection and imagine the lives the women who wore them led, just like I did when I was seven.
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