"The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, and little we see in nature that is ours."  
The one benefit of having a liberal arts education, that I can see, is having quotes like this rattling around in your head like marbles.  This poetry fragment from William Wordsworth often comes to me when I am at auctions, which are the ultimate example of getting and spending.
I recently drove to a Pennsylvania fire house to attend a premium vintage clothing auction. This auction, Whittakers, was attended by The Dukes of Melrose (Decades in LA) the other lady who has a vintage clothing reality show whose assistants are beautifully dressed willowy young men, and various other cranky, respectful, competitive and hell bent for leather vintage clothing dealers who would throw their grandmother under a bus if she had enough Hermes scarves to justify murder.

Of course I am exagerating for entertainment value, but not much.  First off, it was one of the first warm Saturdays of Spring, delicate breezes wafting through new sprung flowers, the sun showing itself finally after weeks of cold rain.  I am in this fire house auditorium with about thirty people sitting in folding chairs riveted to the action on the stage.  Because this was no ordinary auction.  The flowers will come back next spring, but we may never see again the astounding collection of 1920's hats from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the delicate mint green folds of a Fortuny evening dress from the Fashion Institute of Technology, the eighteenth century cotton gown that Marie Antoinette herself would have lounged in, the liquid silver flapper dress from a Euclid Avenue gilded age estate- all in one place!  All for sale to the highest bidder! 

I attended the preview a few days before and wore the obligatory cloth gloves to handle the garments which probably hadn't seen the light of day for 100 or more years.  The experience of seeing hundreds of silk evening gowns from the late 1800's all in one place took my breath away, and handling them gently, seeing the beading , the silk, the intricacy of the designs, the colors no longer seen made by dyes that no longer exist, all I can say is WOW!  I wasn't able to keep the poker face that I saw on some of the higher end dealers.  It felt like I was in Bergdorf Goodman in 1900 , shopping for an outfit for a life I didn't have.

I have always been fascinated by antique clothing, and perhaps it is because of the sense of "otherness" that it exudes, the sense of a different time when people didn't throw on sweat pants and a tee shirt but rather took hours to be carefully secured in layers of cotton, silk, hooks and eyes, ribbons and lace.  And perhaps there is a vouyeristic element of getting a glimpse of the lifestyles of the extremely rich, since these are their artifacts, clothes made of less expensive materials would have decayed by now, or not been valued and have all perished. 

I am estimating from memory here, but standout items were the 1920's baywater green wool cape with red silk lining that had sea lions exquisitely embroidered along the front in a winding art nouveau design. $8,000.00  My bidding card stayed down.  The silver lame sheperdess inspired evening gown also from the 20's, apx. $9,000.00 sold over the phone to an overseas bidder.  The box of ethereal silk afternoon dresses from 1904, airbrushed with the barest suggestion of roses and swathed in spiderwebs of the finest lace, $300.00.  I should have gotten that one! 
And the high prices went on and on as the decades rose, the 1950's beaded cream silk ballgown that must have weighed at least ten pounds- over $4,000.00, the bizzare conquistador jump suit (was it Yves St. Laurent?) thousands, the Chanel lace dress, quite recent , thousands.  By the fifth hour my bidding card was creased and folded and had not been raised once.  I'm thinking, either I am charging way too little, or these people have customers that I have never seen, for whom cost is no object.
After the formal auction, was over and the Dukes of Melrose bagged up his forty thousand dollars of purchases, they did something called a "discovery" auction, which was basically boxed lots of antique clothes that had some flaws or were not designer enough to qualify for the catalog auction. This had a more carnival like atmosphere, more like the auctions I attend regularly, with bad manners, fighting, snide remarks and a blessedly comedic auctioneer tossing the Victorian widow's weeds and white cotton bloomers here and there with gay abandon.  The competition here was no less fierce, however, and the prices high enough to make me airsick.  I bought one lot of evening clothes for much more than I would normally have paid just to make driving all the way to this thing worth the gas and the hellish drivers on the Pennsyvania Turnpike.  The auctioneer said as I held up my card "Is this the first thing you have bought today?"  I nodded.  "I hope it won't be the last!" he says , digging in to the next lot, a box of elfin leather shoes from the Philadelphia Museum. 

I walked out of the fire station after eight hours of concentrated attention, holding my trash bag of garments, the most notable being a cream taffeta rhinestone studded evening dress from 1935 that had a Glida the Good Witch feeling about it.  I had spent the last few days devoted to garments worn by people who were long dead, from a world that no longer exists. 

However, the warm Spring evening as I drove home would have been the same now as then when some hopeful Philadelphia society girl put on this sparkling dress to go out dancing.  Nature connects us to the past probably more than clothes or things do. So, would Wordsworth be miffed at me for spending my day in pursuit of things rather than rambling about the daffodils?  Probably.  But he was a poet, and I sell vintage clothes.