Now-stalgia - why fashion is going back to the future

 

J Lo looking familiar in S/S2020 Versace

Last September, Jennifer Lopez closed Milan’s spring/summer Versace show, shimmering down the catwalk like some A-list whirling dervish, in a sheer jungle-print scarf dress. It was the same sheer scarf dress that she wore on the red carpet of the 2000 Grammys which wowed for the fact it looked like it would disintegrate and fall off her body at any moment. As the fashion critic Robin Givhan wrote at the time: “It was revealing without revealing anything. It dazzled because it threatened to slip away at any moment.” (It also made the term, ahem, “tit tape” go viral).

Nineteen years later, the dress had a different sort of meaning. As she slid down the catwalk to the flashes of 100 iPhones, Lopez was winning Milan fashion week. Here was a strong and confident woman of a certain age, defying stereotypes. But, as a cultural moment it also crystallised an idea that swept through fashion month: fashion is not just stuck in the past, it is in bed with it, snuggling up nice and close and rubbing its cold feet on it.

In Paris, in the same month, the 33-year-old Olivier Rousteing opened his Balmain show with Lindsay Lohan’s 2004 song Rumours (the show also featured 00s classics from Britney Spears, ‘NSync and Christina Aguilera). In the show notes, Rousteing asked: “Is my generation’s nostalgia for our turn-of-the-century childhood culture somehow less cool than fashion’s more familiar fixation on the 70s and 80s?”

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Nostalgia is Officially the Biggest Fashion Trend of 2018

Kate Moss and Kristen McMennamy for Perry Ellis 1993 show

The data doesn’t lie: The ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s are officially fashion’s favorite decades—at least according to Google. In the company’s yearly study of the most trending searches, a metric Google calculates by tracking the greatest increase in year over year searches, the top four fashion searches were: 1980s fashion, grunge fashion, 1990s fashion, and 2000s fashion. Compared to past years, which have featured questions like “How to wear booties with skinny jeans?” as top style queries, the retro revival shows an increased influence of the runways on mainstream fashion searches. Remember, this was the year when Versace’s reissues arrived in stores, Prada brought back its iconic nylon Linea Rossa, and Marc Jacobs remade his infamous grunge collection for Perry Ellis.

Vying with nostalgia as the predominant fashion trend of the year is anything—or anyone—royal. Meghan Markle took the fifth spot on Google’s list, with Kate Middleton placing ninth. Google also released a ranking of fashion brands that have attracted new interest throughout the year—Givenchy, for which Clare Waight Keller designed Markle’s wedding dress, ranked fourth, with a peak of searches happening around the royal wedding and continuing throughout the year.

If you’ve been paying attention to fashion at all this year, the fact that nostalgia and royalty are big on Google isn’t bombshell news. What might surprise you is the fact that Fashion Nova, the online-only fast-fashion retailer, outranked every runway brand, placing first on Google’s trending list. Chalk it up to the Cardi B effect, sure, but more than just having one of the most enthusiastic, authentic spokeswomen and collaborators, Fashion Nova’s rise represents something larger in fashion: community. The Fashion Nova brand connects with its shoppers seamlessly over Instagram; pays its muses to promote its goods in a less glossy, more relatable way—see Cardi’s off-the-cuff post announcing her collection’s release—and makes clothing in sizes and at prices that include more women than other luxury or fast-fashion brands.

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Decoding Fashion's Nostalgia Addiction

Nostalgia is a cog integral to the fashion machine. When elements from the Sixties, Eighties and Nineties can populate a single Gucci collection alone, for example, it’s clear that the past is woven into the present.

Why nostalgia persists is a complicated knot at least partly untangled in interviews with curators. Experts argue that cultural circumstances — including the speed of the industry and technology — have rendered backward glances almost unavoidable.

“A lot of contemporary designers use imagery as a source of inspiration. We are very much an image-based culture nowadays, and I think it’s inevitable that designers would be inspired by former fashion,” said Oriole Cullen, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s curator for modern fashion.


While perhaps more pervasive now, Jessica Regan, assistant curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, noted: “Nostalgia in fashion is not a new phenomenon. We can sit far back in the history of fashion — back to the early 19th century, which was a period of rapid industry and change — and see nostalgia for a preindustrial past, based on romantic notions of chivalry. They incorporated elements from the 16th century.”

Although nearly impossible to cumulatively analyze each era’s influence on modern-day design, curators concur that the 19th century is perhaps the era richest in references. From the drape of a sleeve to the placement of a specific embroidery, the 1800s, by some accounts, were the true genesis of modern fashion as we know it today — when trends began to cycle on a consistent basis.

“I think anything from the 19th century continues to be so important, so many of our modern concepts date back to that time period,” argued Patricia Mears, deputy director for the Museum at FIT.

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