ANew Retro Style

and methodology of the thesis research.

ANew Retro Style

The term “retro” initially referred to the way that some youths wore secondhand

clothes as an alternative fashion. 12 Now it also refers to new things that are

intentionally made to look old. 13 This thesis looks at the current revival of the 2000s

style called Y2K as a retro style, since it references looks from the 2000s but also

makes adjustments. The Y2K fashion trend emerging online is not about fashion

professionals studying what exactly people looked like back in the 2000s, but is more

of a trending topic now often used as a selling point, and the origin is difficult to trace.

This Y2K fashion is not associated with rarity, authenticity, or exclusiveness as

vintage from the wine culture14 , since these Y2K items sold online are newly designed

and mass produced. Then what makes Y2K fashion attractive to young people now?

What is the connected identity of the wearers if there is no heritage behind it?

Elizabeth Guffey points out in her study of the emergence of “retro” in the

context of 1960s popular culture that the Art Nouveau Fever in the 1960s is not only a

movement about the old things coming back and being reminiscent, but also, parts of

it evolved into a sexy and youthful rebellion. In fact, retro is not simply taking pieces

of styles from the past and putting them together again. The point is to look at the past

from a new perspective and to “appl[y] them in anomalous settings” , and this is

12 McRobbie, Angela. (1994).

“Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket. ” In McRobbie, Angeal (ed.) Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge 1994: 135-153. 13 Jenss, Heike. “Vintage: Fashioning Time. ” In Jenss, Heike Fashioning Memory : Vintage Style and Youth Culture: 15-36. London: Bloomsbury 2017. 14 Jenss, Heike. “Vintage: Fashioning Time. ”

essentially more future than past oriented. 15 Guffey argues that when representing

what has happened, retro invokes what will come as well, and nostalgia also reflects

the loss of faith in the future. 16 Historian Raphael Samuel also puts “retro” and “chic”

together, and uses the term “retrochic” to stress that retro exists in the ever-changing

present instead of the past, and exists in the everyday instead of only in the screen and

catwalk. 17 Embedded in retro could be a particular self-reflexiveness, ironic

reinterpretation of the past, and blurring of the “high” and “low” art, and these are

seen as characteristics of this postmodern society. 18 These traits provide the

possibility that retro being an active rebellion of the tradition or social norms.

Fashion today has become a place where individual expression and reflection of

social desires and fears are intertwined. 19 According to Susan Kaiser, fashion is

“about producing clothes and appearances, working through ideas, negotiating subject

positions (e.g., gender, ethnicity, class), and navigating through power relations. ”20 It

is helpful to think here also of experimental fashion, which according to Agata

Zborowska, is often considered what redefines what is acceptable and violates social

norms by representing taboo topics.

21 This idea can be seen in retro fashion, too.

Reinterpreting a style that is passé in the fast paced fashion world where newness is

valued, retro fashion can force people to reevaluate the history and the present.

15 Guffey, Elizabeth E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Books 2006: 12. 16 Guffey, Elizabeth E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. 17 Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso 1994. 18 Guffey, Elizabeth E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. 19 Arnold, Rebecca. Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century. London: I. B. Tauris 2001. 20 Kaiser, Susan B. “Fashion and Culture: Cultural Studies, Fashion Studies. ” In Kaiser, Susan B. Fashion and Cultural Studies: 13-58. London: Bloomsbury 2013: 14. 21 Zborowska, Agata. “Uses and abuses of history: A case of a Comme des Garçon fashion show. ” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 5(2) (2014): 233-252.