Retro poster: vintage is in fashion
The Strangers Things posters by Butcher Billy ( @thebutcherbilly ) set the tone and later helped the commercial confirmation of the enormous sales that posters of classic movies exhibit in the online circuit.
According to a study carried out by the Pinterest platform, a totally visual social network that generates nearly 150 million visits annually, in Argentina alone searches for “vintage home decoration” have increased 20 times.
In fact, if the topic is limited to electronics (and we already know the contribution that the vinyl revival made to the development of turntables), vintage fashion extends to all the electronic devices that reigned in the 80s and 90s. Today it is not strange that new music is being manufactured in cassette format. In the United States, tape sales have doubled their sales this year, and in Japan cassette players have doubled in price in the last two years.
In Spain, for example, according to figures from the site for statistical studies on various topics, Statista , 140,000 vinyl records were sold in 2013, while in 2021, sales reached 1.6 million units.
The vintage poster shines above the rest
Two examples of the influence that the graphic conceptual reinvention of some films has today are embodied by the reinvention with retro posters of films such as "ET the Extraterrestrial" and " Poltergeist ", both films celebrating 40 years since their release in 2022.
Along these lines, the revaluation of the classic peaked with the prices at which the posters reached in a gallery in Dublin, Ireland. Because is there anyone capable of paying a thousand euros for a retro poster?
This question was answered by the founder of Gallery 29, John Rogers: a place to exhibit and sell art located in Ireland. Rogers (who died this year) put into practice his conviction that a vintage poster can be much more than just a piece of paper covering a teenager's walls. "The difference," he said in an interview with Independent.ie, "between modern digital reproductions and old originals is that they used different paper back then in the first half of the 20th century, modern paper often looks shiny on comparison with the ancients. The inks have also changed. Colors from the 1920s tended to have a natural base. It is difficult to combine them with modern chemical inks.”
Rogers sold his posters unframed, but most were linen-backed, a restoration process that makes the fragile paper more durable. In July 2022, “The John Rogers Vintage Poster Collection” went on sale , featuring over 400 original vintage posters dating from 1910 to the 1990s, with estimates ranging from €50 to €1,500 per piece. , many of them lithographs prior to World War II. The most sought-after poster of all?: Dunluce Castle by Julius Olsson, valued at 1,600 euros.
