Vintage Whining

What defines "Vintage" in the model horse collecting world?

As of yet, I haven't stumbled upon a definitive answer.  Breyer has a whole club dedicated to things "vintage" -- molds, painting styles, boxes, and ephemera -- but to my knowledge they haven't actually said where vintage stops and "modern" (or whatever the opposite of vintage is) begins.

A Facebook group, Vintage Model Horse Publications, is dedicated to remembering newsletters issued "before the Internet," but another group,  Vintage Custom Model Horse Sale/Trade/Wanted, doesn't bother to define vintage at all.  I am a member of a group called Vintage Horse and Rider Sets, which loosely defines its parameters as "from the 1950s and 1960s."

There is a Vintage Custom Model Equine Center website.  The doesn't appear to be terribly active, but they do have custom models from the 1970s to the late 1990s in their collection.  There is also a website for what are called Vintage Model Horse Magazines, which so far covers the years from 1969 to 1992.

As an older collector, I cannot deny that there is some sting in the thought that the majority of my collection can now be considered "vintage" in these lights.  However, there are at least two portions of my collection that I'm happy to have considered as vintage.  One portion is my collection of Hartland horse and rider figurines -- apart from a few reissues in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, these all date back to the 1950s, which is vintage in my books.  The other horses that I might consider vintage are those customs I have that were produced in the 1980s with mohair manes and tails.  Although I still find it difficult to think of '80s-released models as vintage, I will concede that, in North America at least, the mohair manes and tails usually point to an earlier customizing technique, which was replaced with sculpted manes and tails when resins began to take hold.

"Shivaree," a vintage custom Sagr from 1987

Of course, there's no clear defining line between when hairing horses was the prefrerred customizing technique, and when that technique fell out of fashion.  As far as I know, it's always been the preferred customizing technique in Europe.  In North America, I suspect it wasn't just the advent of resins that made hairing less popular -- it was probably also the fact that hair manes and tails are difficult to maintain, and will not stand for much brushing if you need to neaten them up for a live show entry.  The very fact that the hair is brushable makes haired horses seem uncomfortably like Barbie horses and similar toys to some collectors.  Probably it was a combination of all of these things which threw haired horses out of favour.

I have two haired vintage customs in my collection, each one made by a hobby friend.  Although the first international hobby newsletter I ever got had a picture of a Bev Zimmer creation (I believe her name was "Venus") on the cover, which led me to covet Zimmer creations ever since, I did not have the wherewithal in my early years of collecting to purchase customs from  "big name" remakers.  So my earliest customs were either customized by me or by friends of mine.

"Kyrie," a vintage custom Might Tango from 1988

I currently own 32 custom model horses, of which only 4 have hair.  Two of those were my own customs on already haired models -- a Largo Toys horse shown as "Friendly" and the Breyer Spirit Paint Kit horse shown as "Yankee Doodle Dandy."  The other two are those vintage customs I spoke of -- a haired Sagr shown as "Shivaree" and a slightly repositioned and haired Might Tango shown as "Kyrie."  

"Kyrie" was originally a black horse with a fun fur mane and tail known as "Evensong." "Evensong" was my one and only attempt at doing a hair mane and tail.  It was so bad even I couldn't bear to look at her, so I gave her to a friend to fix.  That's how "Kyrie" came into being.

Although most of the vintage horses that collectors now covet come from an earlier period, for me "Shivaree" and "Kyrie" have a nice vintage feel.  Better still, each one connects me to a friend made in my earliest collecting days.  All in all, I think I prefer that to having a vintage custom from a "big name" in the hobby.  "Shivaree" and "Kyrie" both mean something to me -- they represent the generosity of friends.  I couldn't believe it when one of my new friends offered to sell me "Shivaree" off her shelf, and I was awestruck by the talent my other friend displayed in bringing my poor attempt at customization back to life.  Although I paid some insignificant sum for both of them, each of them seems like a gift to me now.

Perhaps that's the real meaning of "vintage" in the model horse world.  A "vintage" horse is one that brings back memories of an earlier, seemingly simpler, time.  As such, vintage horses will never go out of style.