Looking Backwards, Going Forwards: How Young Retro Wearers from Italy Relate to the Future

In: Youth and globalization, Band 5, Heft 1, S. 172-192

Abstract

Abstract
Through the analysis of the meanings that are attributed to the clothes that could be classified as retro, this article will examine how young people who are drawn to this particular trend imagine the future. Being empirically rooted, the article contends with the loss of the idea of future, which is often associated with the revivals in fashion as a segment of a wider "retro scenario" (Baudrillard, 1981). According to research findings, not only does that future still exist, but in our path towards it, retro plays a double role: practical, related to the issue of sustainability, which is tightly related to the imagination of future through the lenses of global risks and deterioration; and symbolic, encompassing the entanglement of past, present and future that retro conveys, and stands for the importance of continuity though "embedding" some aspects of past into the idea of future.