Discovering post-retro

For my summative brief I have been given a trend to research and use to promote a product that currently has some standing on socialmedia.

At first (without doing any research) I thought that the post-retro trend is all about vintage fashion; and personally I could never pull of this 'Vintage fashion' look but it has always been something that has captivated and inspired me, how those certain people can pull it off perfectly without looking strange or out of place in the slightest, I thought that post-retro is all about second hand, pre loved clothes and that image of an old American dinner with waitresses on roller skates but I soon found out how wrong my initial thoughts were, there is more to post-retro than just vintage seems to be more of a life style, a culture and a social influence on society.

Post-retro is a trend that has been coming back round for a couple of year now but this year, it was been predominant in the Autumn/ Winter collections. Its a period that spanned over a decade from the late 1960's to the early 1970's (1965 to 1975) when I first looked at this I was overwhelmed in this time period the fashion industry saw so many changes it was almost tripping over itself.

Compared to the early 60's the last five year period was the complete opposite (which really set the theme for the post-retro trend) breaking the rules of conformity seen in the early 60's we were suddenly over whelmed by bright swirling colours, psychedelic and tie dye colour was a vital part but so was pattern and print was everywhere from geometric, linear and repeat to floral print and bold sold strips. The combination of the two something people only dreamed of in past decades, but it was just this the hemline (yeah it seems pretty insignificant) started to shorten, to lengths perilously seen as inappropriate, it wasn't conservative anymore. It just seemed that everything explored the start of a rebellion where London became the centre of the fashion world producing icons like Twiggy.

The early 1970's were no different either although thing did start to tone down just as the patterns and colours becoming slightly more sophisticated but social progressive values continued to grow such as increasing political awareness and political and economic liberty of women. The hippie culture that started in the 1960's started to waned in the early 70's and faded by the mid 70's. In this decade the fashion scene can be described in one word for me Flamboyant.

There are so many aspects of this trend that I could research into I honestly didn't really know where to start, it a trend that to this day has had an effect on the fashion world. But as a starting point I decided to look into the more historical and cultural aspects such as film, TV, architecture, cultural/social movements to say the least.

Still to this day we are seeing elements and aspects of post-retro in both film and TV, Wes Anderson is someone who appears to embody this. Hs work is greatly influenced by the idea of post-retro whether this is through colour schemes, song selection, clothes or even how they are filmed all other this can be seen within his films especially 'The Royal Tenenbaums' he always seems to create a perfect combination that makes you feel like you have traveled back to the past.

Architecture at this time was also very important, it was modernising with new design concepts being created, one of the biggest designers/ architects of the time who really put his mark on post-retro is Arne Jacobsen who is mostly known for his simple yet very effective chair designs the most icon of these being 'the egg', featuring clean line and a silhouette that resembles post of a geometric pattern he was a modernist for the time whose design are still influential to this day.

One of the final elements that I looked at in my initial research was the northern soul movement, which had close relations to the mod scene and developed from black American soul singers along with the black power movement of the 1960's which is how the symbol for Northern soul came about. it was a youth subculture movement that spoke out about white industrial lives in the 1970's using fashion as of there biggest statements.

The next step following this research for me is to look more into the fashion trend within this time period that come together to create the now known post-retro trend that we are currently seeing.