Semi-Antique

Semi-antique is the rug trade's word for the gap between vintage and antique, and like most trade words it means slightly different things depending on who is selling. The commonest reading puts antique at a hundred years and over, semi-antique at fifty to a hundred, and vintage at forty or more. Some dealers draw the lines earlier: antique from eighty years, semi-antique loosely fifty to eighty, vintage thirty to eighty. The one hard number in the field is the customs one. United States import rules treat an article as antique at a hundred years of age, which is why the century matters more to auction houses than to weavers, who never dated anything.

For a Moroccan rug the word lands on a particular stretch of time. A piece that is semi-antique today was woven somewhere between the 1920s and the 1970s: after synthetic dyes had begun to reach the mountains, during the Protectorate and the decades after independence, and before the export boom of the 1980s rebuilt the trade around what foreigners wanted. So a semi-antique Beni M'Guild or Zayan can carry madder and indigo next to an early aniline purple, undyed ivory next to a chemically bright orange, and be entirely of its moment in both. The term tells you little about quality and nothing about condition; it is a date range with a sales accent.

Tilwen uses it sparingly. Where the evidence supports it, a piece is dated to a decade, with the basis stated: dye behaviour, wear, structure, the history of the group that made it. Where the evidence runs out, the description says vintage and stops, rather than reaching for the older-sounding word. The conventions for vintage (roughly 1930 to 1985 here) and antique (credible evidence of making before 1930) are set out in their own entries; semi-antique is the overlap between them, used when a piece sits at the old end of vintage and the evidence says so.

The useful habit, with any seller, is to translate the label back into years and then ask what the years rest on.