As a dedicated buyer of vintage clothing, I must say it's a bit of a wake-up call when the vast majority of the 'vintage' now on sale is from the 1980s.

How can it be? That was MY era. Wasn't it yesterday?

Well, mmn, no, it wasn't - what a sad truth that is.

When I first began seriously collecting vintage clothes at about the age of 11, it was 1974. At that time I was entranced by Victorian and Edwardian whites (I was a romantic sort of child), but I quickly moved on to the silks and velvets of the 1920s and 1930s. At this time, this was clothing that had been made about 40-50 years before I was born - when my grandparents were young - and that made it truly 'vintage'. 

In my 20s, I collected fashion from the 30s and 40s. By the time I reached my 30s, I had expanded into collecting clothing from the 50s and very occasionally the early 60s - clothing made 10 years before I was born, or roughly contemporary with my birth. Still felt vintage enough for me.

I had a bug up my ass about the 1970s for a long time - growing up in a working-class family in this era, all I recall is the godawful crimpelenes and nylons, the flares of static that occurred every time you took your clothes off, the ghastly colours and prints. Now, I am just about able to accept that the 70s also produced some high-end clothing and may have had something to offer. So that is clothing from when I was a young girl.

But the 80s? How can this be? How can something that I wore in my heyday, be vintage?

This is not, of course, how the young see it. For them the 80s is a long time past. Looking at the 80s, and knowing nothing of the political turmoil of those days, all they see a delightfully kitsch era, characterised by rubbish music, mad hair, bling everywhere, and loads of colour. 

And of course it was like that - not that we noticed at the time. We never noticed the big hair and the poofy sleeves, the plethora of metallics and sequins, the zinging magentas, blues and purples - it was just the way things were, the ever-turning circle of fashion. When my friend Fergus had his bubble permed hair dyed in alternate locks of ash blond and golden blond, we thought nothing of it, nor of the fact that he tucked his baggy pants into his pixie boots - all 6 foot 4 of him. 

When the teenagers and 20-somethings of today wear 80s clothes, they are dressing up in their mums' frocks, just as my friend Becky and I used to do with her mum's 1950s rayon shirtwaists with their neat piping and collars and cuffs. But for kids now, 80s clothes are worn with a massive dose of irony. Words often attached these items when on sale are 'trashy', 'bling', 'transvestite', 'kitsch', 'grunge', 'goth', 'rockabilly'.

They wear our clothes as a joke - it was a crap era and they know it. Is it a shame or not that we ourselves didn't? 

Oh well. I only wish I'd hung on to more of it, frankly.  Now, I could spit. The Chesterfield jackets with football-player shoulders from Alexon and Planet; the Wallis coatdresses with contrasting collars and cuffs; the beaded bustiers and picture sweaters covered in scottie dogs and sheep. Five years ago, I couldn't even give them away - sell them now and I'd be minted. 

Since the new year, I've been thinking very hard about my wardrobe - how it's working for me, and what I like and don't like about it.

I've come to the conclusion that fight it as I may, the absolute favourite part of my wardrobe is the vintage items. Every item on my list of favourites or most-worn is vintage. Some are valuable, some are not, but they are the things I would rescue in a house fire.

I've had some of them since I was really quite young - say 11 years old. Each item is unique, many of them have handwork that in a modern age could only be reproduced by buying couture, or are made from fabrics that are no longer produced.

Nevertheless, over the past few years, I've also divested myself of many of them. As you build up a collection, inevitably you get duplicates, or your tastes change, and as with everything else you own, every dog has its day. Styles become too young for you, or a garment too small, for instance. If you find you're not wearing something, it's best to pass it on.

But at Christmas, I made a mistake. I sold one garment too many and its loss made me feel absolutely ill. I shouldn't have done it. And although that garment, being unique, is irreplaceable, I decided that the best cure for my angst was to buy something new, and that would make me feel better. 

And indeed it has. I happened upon, on Ebay, a vintage quilted silk jacket that gave that tug at my heartstrings. You know the kind. In real life, it turned out to be much more beautiful than the picture online, a sort of rich conker-brown colour, with the most perfect topstitching making chevrons and swirls all over it. It fits me to a T and I can see me wearing it for the rest of my life. 

It also replaced a gap in my collection. I had at one time had a peach quilted 1930s bed jacket that was quite similar, but over time the silk had shattered and the garment simply fell apart. This is something you have to expect with old clothes, but it is always a shame when it happens. This jacket therefore re-ticks that particular box in my collection. 

Realising this made me sit down and work out exactly what it is I want from my vintage clothes, so that I can target my future buying more accurately. My list is as follows, and it shows that I'm a magpie who cannot resist a bit of glitter.

* Lame and other metallic fabrics from the 1920s to the 1960s. I especially love the real metal fabrics of the 20s and 30s, but am also becoming partial to the synthetic brocades of the 1950s and 60s. These have a lot of body and sometimes a wonderful texture - shown are fabrics from three garments I've bought recently.

* Sequins and beading, particularly 1920s gelatine sequins. These can't be washed, but they have far more lustre than plastic sequins. I'm also partial to fully-beaded or sequinned cardigans of the 1950s and 60s, which luckily can be dry-cleaned.

* Silk velvet and satin of the 1920s and 30s. Some of my favourite evening jackets and dresses are in these whisper-fine fabrics, which modern fabrics can't come close to emulating. Wearing one is like being stroked by a chinchilla.

* Dressmaker details of the 1930s-50s. Ruching, shirring, faggotting, godets, inserts, hemstitching, drawn-thread work, embroidery, bias-cutting etc. Garments of these eras abound in wonderful little touches, many of them in home-made garments created by women for their own use.

* New-look and 1950s tailoring, with a nipped-in waist. ALL of the day jackets that now I wear most often are from the 1950s, which is a shape that suits my size and shape far better than modern tailoring.

* Luxurious coats, especially new-look coats and swingback coats of the 1950s.  With their very distinct outlines - either nipped-in or loose and flowing - these coats are wonderfully distinctive - and they often wear very well, not being the least bit fragile.

Defining and refining my taste in this way makes me realise that vintage is really the most important thing in my wardrobe, and that this is where I should spend the majority of my clothing cash in the future.

Speaking of vintage, as we were re Mary Queen of Charity Shops, I just came across this site: Retro Chick, selling vintage fashion at very modest prices.

Got to be a little bit careful about that term 'vintage' if you're over 40, of course.

Vintage for me means the 1960s and before. Might just get away with the 70s at a squeak, but the 80s is a definite no-no, at least if you can TELL.

There is something terribly ageing about wearing clothing from the era of your heydey, as if you can't accept the passing years. Jumping backwards from that a decade, or preferably two, makes it cool again. 

My personal favourite era is the 1930s - I don't think clothing has ever been so beautiful again, nor the fabrics as luscious - though I'm also quite partial to the 1920s and 1950s. The 60s, for me, you can mostly keep - it is the era of Crimpelene and nylon, sta-prest and Dacron. I remember sweating like a pig in a sandwich bag in those synthetic fabrics, and little 60s shift dresses don't suit anyone with boobs.

That said, I do have a few silk and wool things from the 60s that are very Jackie O and out of which I get a lot of mileage. And the problem with 1930s and 1950s clothes is that the prices stroll on - you're really into specialist stores here. 

Anyway, give the site a visit, if only to sigh at how you dressed when you were 20. 

I watched the final part of Mary Queen of Charity Shops last night and it was a delight. 

Love her or loathe her (and by the way, it's great to see a woman of nearly 50 looking quite so foxy), you can't deny Mary's efficiency. Her reforms in her local charity shop raised takings (which is near-enough to say profits) from £900 a week to £2,000. Even allowing for the refitting, which should pay for itself in 16 weeks, and the new manager's salary, that means an increase of about £36,000 in a single year - an increase to Save the Children of around 4.5 million smackers, if rolled out across the board and their other shops are equally dismal (not to say that they are, of course - one suspects they gave her the worst of the worst so that it would make better television). 

The changes were not without casualties, it must be said. Used to their own way of doing things, many of her volunteer helpers could not adapt to the new direction in which she was taking the shop and the influx of young people that they clearly thought were from another planet, and at least half a dozen quit.

I found this a little strange, actually - a busy day in a shop is exhausting, but in a good way. Having nothing to do is ghastly.  I well remember trying to sell summer clothes in February in a boutique in Kensington High Street where we fought over the customers just to have someone to talk to. And when you're at work, you're at work, even if it's voluntary work - you wouldn't be much use cleaning up the inner city if all you did was lean on your spade and eat biscuits all day.

The staff that remained were worth their weight - saucy old dears with a young heart.

Mary instituted a policy of collecting good cast-offs from large companies, and persuaded her fashion maties to dress up in what they charmingly called 'vintage' (how depressing it is when the clothes you wore in your teens are now vintage to a younger generation) - and very good they looked too. Peaches Geldof looked extremely cure in her flowery dress, while Erin O'Connor, always a charmer, sported a gorgeous brocade jacket I would have given my eye teeth for. 

All in all, her 'new' shop looked like an indoor market (much to the distress of one member of staff), though I myself prefer a shop that looks like a good vintage boutique and canny charity shop managers have been doing that for a long time. 

It was a wake-up call for me, though, to see how much British society has changed while I've been away. Here in rural France we have entirely missed the rampant consumerism that appears to gobbled up the British psyche in the past decade, where women buy themselves new clothes every week or virtually every day. French women, on the whole, buy high-end clothing, carefully and incrementally, and wear everything they own - they don't buy on impulse and never take the tags off.

Nor does the problem of such rubbishy donations arise to the same degree - there are collection points for good, used clothing at every supermarket so it is easy to make your donations.

I had no idea that charity shops had become synonymous with crap. When I was a student we LIVED in charity shops and second-hand markets, teaming our simple chain-store staples with cheap but gorgeous finds, mostly because we were full of ideas but had absolutely no money. This photo from 1983 shows me with friends Ann, Pam and Graham - every one of us in vintage, mostly because it was the cheapest way we could find something original to wear. Wish I had that green dress now...

Women hang onto their favourite clothes even longer than men do, according to a survey commissioned by the BBC's The Clothes Show.

The programme found that many women keep favourite outfits for 11-12 years - coincidentally (or not), the length of time the average relationship lasts before it fails (if it's going to fail, of course).

The results clearly came as a surprise to the programme's hosts, who had imagined, like many of us, that it is men who hang onto their scabby old outfits, but I think a different factor is at play here.

Men hang onto clothes because they hate replacing things, and they wear them till they fall apart, but I think women hang onto things for their talismanic value - wedding dresses, party frocks and favourite shoes - and only get them out of the wardrobe once a year to look at them. This is certainly the case for me with my wedding dress - I can't quite think of someone else owning it while I'm still alive. 

That said, it made me realise that I'm a hoarder and a half by these standards. I have many clothes in my wardrobe that date back 10, 15, even 20 years. If a thing's good, and I love it, I certainly keep it. My 'oldest' clothes I've had for about 30 years, including a fox fur, a 1930s beige lace blouse and a Victorian hussar's jacket.

Notably, these are all vintage items, which were never 'in' fashion, and so are never out of fashion. The other items that have gone on from decade to decade are items that are, if you like, 'beyond' fashion - my Aigle wellies, my cashmere sweaters in polo, v- and crewneck and my merino knitted pencil skirts. Everything else just comes and goes - the big shoulders, the acid colours, particular fabrics or treatments that date badly.

Other items get worn out. I'm hard on jeans, for instance, so they get replaced on a rolling basis, while coat and jacket styles tend to date, so the only jackets that have lasted a long time in my wardrobe are also vintage. They include a blonde suede 1960s biker jacket, a brown tweed 1940s jacket with burgundy velvet trim, a heathery tweed 1950s jacket with a fake fur collar, and a wartime green wool jacket with a 'milium' lining (a thermal lining usually used for curtains). Coats include a heavy camelhair 1950s swing coat with nutria collar and cuffs, a 1950s burgundy velvet evening coat and a 1960s grey fitted persian lamb in a Russian style - warm as toast on a bitter day.

It's nice to have new things - for instance, I'm really enjoying my new stretch cords from Hennes that I bought at the start of the season, and my new Boden jeans - but it's nice to know I'm not alone in hanging on to old faithfuls too.