Wearing Memories

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

22 Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia. ”

23 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.

uses the word “sartorial biography” to refer to the ability of fashion to record social

experiences. 27 Sophie Woodward in her book Why Women Wear What They Wear

examines how clothing can be a bearer of memory. 28 Heike Jenss uses the word

“fashioning memory” in her book to show that fashion and memory are “material,

embodied, enacted” practices. 29 In fact, personal memory is very much embedded in

or connected with cultural memory, which helps to explore “how the past forms a part

of meaning-making in and of the present. ”30 Nostalgia, as a part of cultural memory,

is also a crucial part of the personal memory of following generations. 31 Visual

performance through dressing in retro styles is actually a form of following

generations’active exploration of temporality.

In Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, Liedeke Plate and Anneke

Smelik propose that “[m]emory needs to be understood as an effect of a variety of

institutionalised discourses and cultural practices. ”32 This idea emphasizes not only

the social and cultural aspects of memory, but also its essence as a performance, a

creative act - and dressing is such a deed. According to Michael Rothberg, memory

requires individuals as well as the public’s agency in “recognizing and revealing the

production of memory as an ongoing process involving inscription and reinscription,

27 Tarlo, Emma.

“Islamic Cosmopolitanism: The Sartorial Biographies of Three Muslin Women in London. ” Fashion Theory 11(2-3) (2007): 143-172. 28 Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford: Bloomsbury 2007. 29 Jenss, Heike. Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture. London: Bloomsbury 2017: 8. 30 Jenss, Heike. Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture: 7. 31 Assmann, Jan and Czaplicka, John. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. ” New German Critique, 65 (1995): 125-133; Keightley, Emily and Pickering, Michael. The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012. 32 Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke. “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction. ” In Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke (eds.) Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge 2013: 1-22: 2-3.

coding and recoding. ”33 Embodying institutionalized discourses, cultural practices,

and technological artefacts, 34 memory represents not only personal stories, but stories

within a wider sociopolitical context. In the case of Smart style, the lamentation of the

members that it can never be as popular and as respected and appreciated as in the

2000s shows the different cultural landscape now. On the other hand, bringing back

this style is a way for the post-95s to perform their memory visually, and it tells a

story within another part of history.

One of the reasons behind recreating memories could be the feeling of

nostalgia. Many scholars see “nostalgia” as a concept made by mass merchandisers

who construct time and experiences of losses that did not happen. For instance, Arjun

Appadurai argues that mass advertising uses the idea of nostalgia to teach consumers

to miss something they never lost. 35 He points out that “imagined nostalgia” or

“armchair nostalgia” and fantasy are thus combined together to create more

commodified objects. 36 However, nostalgia embedded in retro trends are more than

the capital.

Studies that examine nostalgia prevailing in the 1970s US show that it is in fact

a mechanism for people to adapt to the rapid political, social, and economic changes,

because of which “the present is perceived as being so different from the past that past

experience becomes increasingly useless, and the future is imagined as so different

33 Rothberg, Michael.

“Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire. ” Yale French Studies (118/119) (2010): 3-12: 8-9, quoted in Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke, “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction. ” : 3. 34 Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke. “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction. ” 35 Maurice, Halbwachs. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row 1980, quoted in Arjun Appadurai,

Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996. 36 Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

from the present that it seems impossible to come up with long-range expectations.

”37

It is even more so today because of globalization and the use of the Internet starting

from the 1990s. Retro can be a way for this fast developing society to reevaluate and

retell its own history and then to come to terms with the modern past. 38 Facing the

society that is already unrecognizable from what they used to know as children, young

people now could turn to nostalgia as a safe place. They dream of and imitate the past

that might be magnified and prettified in some ways. 39 Focusing on solely parts of the

memories, they long for a past that is appealing but also suspicious. 40 Could fashion

be such a place that contains the memories?

In this sense, nostalgia is processed not passively as information given by

advertisements, but entails various possibilities of interpretations and new experiences

in the present. 41 In Becker’s words, this kind of practice “might not have been as

rebellious and original as rock and roll had been the first time around, but it too was a

sign of opposition to the cultural mainstream. ”42 The idea that nostalgia could be a

marketing strategy or could also be used for emotional purpose provides possible

explanations of the meanings of Y2K style. Chinese youths in urban areas nowadays

wearing styles from the 2000s show this connection between the past and present, and

fashion’s ability to form cultural memories. Y2K as a selling point nowadays may

37 Becker, Tobias. “The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique. ” History and Theory 57(2) (2018): 234-250:

245. 38 Jameson, Frederic.

“Nostalgia for the Present. ” In Jameson, Frederic Post Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press 1991. 39 Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York and London: Macmillan 1979. 40 Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia. ” Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 4(1-2) (2013): 107-124. 41 Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia. ” 42 Becker, Tobias. “The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique. ” History and Theory 57(2) (2018): 234-250: 247.