Beyond designers who experiment with the past style, youths are also experimenting with identity expressions by wearing such fashion. Especially for subcultural styles like Smart, which has a complicated social background and is disappearing, the new retro style resembling it makes people think about the social, political, and cultural reality in the 2000s and in the 2020s, even if the revival gives birth to another rather different culture instead of replicating the same one.
Wearing Memories In recent years fashion scholars have started to pay increasing attention to the connection between retro, fashion, and memory. As Heike Jenss shows in her discussion of the intersections among nostalgia, the circulation of images and temporalities of fashion, in order to recreate a past or to relive the memory, people not only tell and retell stories and experiences of their parents’ generation, but they also pass on intergenerationally memories of media, visual and material culture, including fashion.22 Fashion can be viewed as “lieux de mémoire”23 or “a site for the manifestation of traces or places of memory.”24 As the materials that help our bodies to be seen in a specific time and place,25 dress “plays an intimate material role in the enactment and experience of the body and culture.”26 Various studies have examined fashion’s role in composing personal and cultural memory. For example, Emma Tarlo Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia.” Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. (trans. M. Roudebush).” Representations 26 (1989): 7-25: 7. 24 de Greef, Erica. “Fashion as a site for memory: Reflections on a fashion exhibition, ‘Clive Rundle About Memory’.” International Journal of Fashion Studies 1(2) (2014): 247-268: 251. 25 Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia.” 26 Jenss, Heike and Hofmann, Viola (Eds.). Fashion and Materiality: Cultural practices, global context. London: Bloomsbury 2019: 1. 22 23
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