San Diego’s Hottest Vintage Clothing Boutiques: Let’s Do the Time Warp

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    What’s the average hiatus before an era comes back into fashion? Two decades? Less? Before we had a chance to really mourn the demise of the eighties, and truly condemn the decade’s style, fishnet tops and neon lace leggings were back on the racks. Already the nineties seem imminent: gaucho pants look an awful lot like culottes.

    It’s easy to find trendy remakes of vintage duds in the mall, but isn’t the real thing much better? Luckily, San Diego is home to its fair share of vintage boutiques, where the super-stylish can buy (and sell) authentic, coveted secondhand apparel and accessories. Hillcrest tops the charts as the city’s best destination for doing the time warp, with several superb vintage shops that span every possible era from disco funk to caveman chic. Okay, maybe not the latter.

    Rags the Fashion Exchange on University is the low-price leader, with a large, ever-changing stock of secondhand items, both modern and retro. The store’s footwear section is especially fabulous.

    About a block away on Fifth, the community’s two most popular vintage shopping destinations face off: Buffalo Exchange and Flashbacks. Buffalo Exchange offers items that lean towards the ultra-modern side. You’ll likely stumble upon finds as cutting edge as those aforementioned trendy remakes of vintage duds alongside the authentic items. Flashbacks, however, is the dancing queen of times of yore. The store is an explosion of retro clothing, sixties, eighties, you name it, much like walking inside a lava lamp. Flashbacks is the place to purchase truly ostentatious costume gear, like afro wigs and zebra-print velvet pimp robes. Both Buffalo Exchange and Flashbacks also have locations on Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach.

    Wear it Again Sam, also on Fifth, is a more elegant choice, selling only high-quality clothing and pre-fifties designer pieces. The store has prices to match, so it’s not the place to visit if you’re looking for deals. A little further away, the sardonically named Frock You boasts only pre-cleaned items, and as a result the store has none of that malodorous thrift-store scent. Half the store holds stock from the forties and fifties, and the other half is home to the sixties onward.