Vintage, semi-antique, new: what the words mean

The word antique has a number in it, and the number was written by customs officers. Heading 9706 of the United States tariff schedule reads, in full, "Antiques of an age exceeding one hundred years". Such things enter free of duty. If an importer claims the heading and the article turns out to be younger, a note to the same chapter adds a duty of 6.6 per cent on top of whatever else applies. The regulation that goes with it, 19 CFR 10.53, says the customs officer must be satisfied the article meets the age, and that repairs are allowed as long as they do not add so much new material that the thing stops being the original.

That is where the hundred-year rule comes from. Not from the trade, not from museums, from the tariff. Most of the world's rug dealers have adopted it because it is the one definition anybody can check against a calendar.

Everything else is softer. A rug lexicon kept by one long-running trade website gives the usual trade ladder: antique, more than a hundred years; semi-antique, between fifty and a hundred; vintage, more than forty. The same page notes that some dealers call a rug antique at eighty years, and that some use vintage where others would say semi-antique. There is no authority that settles it. A word on a label is a dealer's habit, and habits differ by country, by decade, and by how much the dealer wants for the rug.

What the words mean for Moroccan rugs is narrower than for Persian ones, because Moroccan rugs were not dated and were not kept.

Nobody wrote the year on a loom in the Middle Atlas. A rug was woven for the house, used on the floor, slept on, washed in the river, patched, and when it was finished with it was cut up for saddle pads or given to the dog. Rugs older than the 1940s that have survived in good condition are few, and the ones that reach the market have almost always passed through several hands with no paper at all. A dealer who says a Beni Ourain is from 1920 is guessing from the wool, the dye, the wear and the drawing, and so is the dealer who says 1960. The guess can be educated. It cannot be proved.

Dye is the best clock there is. Khalid Loukid, curator at the national museum of weaving and carpets in Marrakech, records synthetic dyes spreading in Morocco from the late 1880s, weavers around Ouarzazate working almost entirely with imported colours by the early twentieth century, and the French protectorate stamping export carpets from 1919 to protect natural dye. So a rug in plant colours alone is probably older or more remote; a rug with a bright packet orange in it is probably not from before the 1930s, and more likely from after 1960. Wool helps too. Handspun yarn is uneven, and older rugs are more often handspun through. Machine-spun warps and wefts under a hand-knotted pile usually mean the second half of the twentieth century. And a rug with a certain softness in the pile, a flattening of the knots and a back that has gone glossy with years on a floor, has been lived on, whichever decade it started in.

So this is how the words are used here.

Vintage, on this site, means a rug woven some decades ago, lived with, and not made for sale to a foreigner. In practice that is the 1950s to the 1990s. The pile is softer than new wool, the colours have moved, the back shows the knots, and there is wear. The rug has a past, and the past is part of what is being sold.

Circa means around. Circa 1980 means the rug was most likely woven within about ten years either side of that date, judged from the wool, the dye, the drawing and the condition, with no document behind it. It is not a code for 1980 exactly, and it is not a code for anything older. When the clues point to a decade and no closer than that, the decade is what is written.

Semi-antique is a word Tilwen does not use. Nobody can show that a Moroccan rug is fifty rather than forty years old, and a term that implies that precision promises more than can be delivered.

Antique is a word Tilwen does not use either, and the reason is the number. A rug described as antique is being described as woven before 1926 at the latest. For a Moroccan tribal rug that is a claim that can almost never be supported, and a buyer who later takes it to a specialist, or through customs under heading 9706, deserves not to be embarrassed. The honest form is to say what the evidence says: old, vintage, circa a decade.

New means new. A rug knotted this year by a woman in the Middle Atlas is a hand-knotted wool rug in a living tradition, and that is a good thing to own. It is not vintage. The word that most often misleads is not antique, which is rare, but vintage applied to a rug that was woven last winter and washed hard to look older. The signs are a pile that is even all over, colours that match on the front and the back, no wear at the ends where feet go, and a smell of chemical wash. An honest new rug does not need to pretend.

A rug that is sold as "mid-century" was woven somewhere between the 1940s and the 1960s, by the usual meaning of the phrase. It has become a decorating word, and like all decorating words it drifts. "Tribal" means the rug comes from a weaving tradition with a people's name on it rather than a city workshop. "Collectible" means the dealer likes it. None of these is a date.

The tariff wrote the number. The weavers never wrote anything. In between, every word on a label is a promise, and the smaller the promise, the more likely it is to be kept.