You might think that Chanel suits are out of your price range. You might suspect that a piece of couture Balmain is something you could never even dream of owning. But if you have come across Kerry Taylor, an auctioneer specialising in vintage fashion, you’ll know otherwise.

Taylor, you see, regularly sells vintage designer fashion, including classic Chanel suits and spectacular 1980s Balmain, for as little as £300 at her six-yearly sales at Kerry Taylor Auctions.  

‘If you want to go and spend £300 on a dress on the high street and look the same as everyone else, and have that dress be worth £10 tomorrow, then fine,’ says the no-nonsense but very charming Taylor, when I meet her at her Bermondsey auction house. ‘But for the same money you could buy a beautiful 1920s flapper dress, a wonderful 1950s cocktail gown or an Ossie Clark original. And if you want to sell them again, you would get your money back.’

"Certainly, at the auctions, we’ll have young women who want to buy to wear. It’s really easy to bid and it’s exciting." - Kerry Taylor

It’s a convincing point, one that becomes even more persuasive when you begin to nose around the south London auction house. There are rails and rails of clothes, 1990s pieces that you remember seeing on the pages of magazines, dresses from the 1960s that you spied on Rosamund Pike in An Education; there are gowns that once belonged to Princess Diana and corsets from the 1800s. It’s a modern grey room, crammed full of cast-offs of the highest quality, the unmistakable waft of vintage (‘Musty-dusty,’ Taylor calls that. ‘Dry-cleaning will take care of it’) alerting you to a wealth of fashion spoils. There’s the vivid green velvet of a Charles Frederick Worth coat, the navy bouclé of a Chanel suit – you want to touch it, try it all on, you want to own it. And that’s not some fashion fantasy.

‘Certainly, at the auctions, we’ll have young women who want to buy to wear,’ Taylor confirms, saying that those who are intimidated by the auction process can bid online or over the phone. ‘It’s really easy to bid and it’s exciting.’

Those young women will be bidding against museums, fashion houses buying for their archives, fashion designers looking for inspiration, film costume designers, fashion historians and what Taylor calls ‘the academic lot’. Most pieces will sell for figures in the hundreds but some will go for a much higher price.

‘The highest price I’ve ever gotten for a McQueen piece is £65,000,’ says Taylor with pride. ‘It was not even couture. It was a press sample of a ready-to-wear piece from the ‘Salem Witch Trials’ collection. Alexander McQueen is so important. And any museum or major collector out there who hasn’t got a seminal piece by him has to get one.’

Fifty-two-year-old Taylor, who is from north Wales and completed an art foundation course but didn’t go to university, began her career as a receptionist at Sotheby’s in Chester in 1979. Soon, on the basis of hard work and complete devotion – ‘I worked every hour that God sent, for a pitiful salary’ – she was head of the London collectibles department, a division she founded. ‘To begin with, we were seen as the fun department at Sotheby’s but when the turnover started to match things like ceramics and glass, people began to sit up and take notice.’ 

In 2003, after 24 years, she parted ways with Sotheby’s and set up her own business, taking her clients with her. Although now without a brand name with the cachet of Sotheby’s, people continued to depend on her to sell their treasures – ‘Everyone knows I do well,’ she says, referring to the high prices she can achieve for those special pieces – and collectors continued to trust her. Kerry Taylor is an internationally respected auctioneer and after a couple of hours in her company, you understand why. First off, there is that complete devotion and formidable work ethic – ‘I have just never stopped working, I am always doing something, I don’t know where it comes from’ – and then there is the breadth of her knowledge: this woman knows everything there is to know about the history of fashion, she rattles off fascinating facts with complete ease, the information – specific, relevant, articulately put – is there, ready as soon as you pose a question.

She can spot a fake, even a good one and ‘they’re getting cleverer and cleverer’, easily, and she is sharp, keen, astute. She is warm too, smiling wide and often, and when I meet her she is wearing a pretty, slightly mumsy war-time navy dress with floral embroidery but it is always clear: this woman is an expert at what she does. ‘I’ve been doing this longer than most museum curators have been in their jobs,’ she says. ‘You won’t meet someone who knows more.’

"The highest price I’ve ever gotten for a McQueen piece is £65,000" - Kerry Taylor

She has decided to share that expertise in a new book, Vintage Fashion: From Poiret to McQueen, a 224-page hardback full of practical information, useful hints for buying vintage and lots and lots of pictures. She wrote 150,000 words for the book, starting at 6am before the auction house opened and working late into the evenings – her husband, a potter, ‘wanted to kill me’, she admits – but it has since been whittled down to 50,000. ‘A lot of people now are perhaps not so fascinated by the history as I am,’ she says, with the slightest hint of dejection. Still though, her passion for her subject is obvious and the book belongs on the coffee table of every fashion enthusiast. 

So who then is her favourite designer, her ultimate must-have? Of course there is McQueen, a designer she clearly rates as the best of his generation, but if she had to choose her favourite designer of the last 100 years, who would it be? ‘Madeleine Vionnet,’ she says after only the briefest of pauses. ‘She was just a genius and the things are so incredibly clever.’

Her face lights up, her eyes become animated. ‘You would never find a seam where you would expect to find a seam, she was just so skilled and masterly but the pieces have a simplicity to them.’

There is one sartorial subject though that fails to float her boat and that’s the present day. ‘If you say to me ‘What’s the 2000s about then?’ Pfffff, I don’t know,’ she says with a sigh. ‘I mean so much of it is a mish-mash of retro styles. I’m at a loss to say what the strong looks are. I’m going to have to retire before I start selling anything too recent.’

Vintage Fashion: From Poiret to McQueen is published by Octopus on 7 October. For information on Kerry Taylor Auctions see www.kerrytaylorauctions.com.