Here's a new idea - let's go retro

Jun 26 2009 by Alan Shaw

FOR a while I was starting to wonder if, as a nation in general, we had run out of new ideas.

It’s just that everywhere I turned, everything seemed to be a bit, well, old.

Television was bringing back commercials from the 1970s and 1980s, bands from the 80s and 90s were doing better in the charts than their current-day counterparts, and chocolate bars which were withdrawn from sale because no one bought them were revived and suddenly started selling millions.

It turns out that these things are not old; they are retro – which is the new cool, apparently.

I’ve been trying to keep up with this current not-so-current trend but I’ll admit I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks. For a start, how old does something need to be before it can be considered retro, and when is it too old?

Take clothing, for example: would seeking out a pair of brown corduroy trousers at my local charity shop be going back too far? What about the shell suit, which I’m sure I still have at the back of a wardrobe, is that old enough yet to make a comeback?

It would seem, though, from looking at the bands which are getting back together and the movies which are being re-released that the early to mid 1980s are the coolest at the moment. Which is strange, because I just about remember them the first time around and they certainly didn’t seem that great.

The cold war was still going on, there were miners strikes, Clive Sinclair’s computers were our vision of the future and music – compared to the big rock bands a few years previous – was just naff. Wasn’t there also a recession and massive unemployment?

So it would seem that about 25 years is enough for us still to remember all the good bits and forget the bad. At least it does mean one thing. In the years to come we’ll be able to look back fondly on the great credit crunch of 2009.

The only down side is that, inevitably, before we reach that stage, those shell suits will come back into fashion.

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