Retro Fashion

Retrospective which is Retro for short, or a vintage style usually refers to clothing, shoes, or fashion accessories that imitates the style of a previous era. Reproduction, or repro, clothing is a newly made copy of an older garment. Clothing produced more recently is usually called modern or contemporary fashion.

Retrospective means, looking back on or dealing with past events or situations.  Retro clothing is clothing designed with past trends in mind.

Retro style is style that is consciously derivative or imitative of trends, music, modes, fashions, or attitudes of the recent past.  Retro fashion is a clothing style which consists in wearing clothes commonly used in the past. This way of clothing often includes garments and accessories that are characteristic of such times, and many people use them in an exaggerated way and in combination with current clothing. Examples are leather handbags from the 1950s, "bell-bottom jeans", Poodle skirts, big sunglasses, fedoras, funky jackets (commonly Adidas Classics) and shoes, small neckties, chiffon scarves, sport equipment, etc.  

• Difference between vintage & retro fashion.

Learn about vintage clothing.

You may also want to learn about the following:

Second Hand Fashion

Used Clothing

Consignment

Thrift Shops

Retro, Vintage, Reproduction: Keeping the Terms Straight

Three terms are constantly confused in second-hand and revival fashion, and the distinction is commercial as well as semantic. Vintage is a claim about age: the garment itself was made in the era it represents. Retro is a claim about design: the garment is new, but its style imitates an era — a brand-new poodle skirt sewn this year is retro, not vintage, however faithful the copy. Reproduction, or repro, is the most precise claim of all: a newly made copy of a specific older garment, reproduced pattern and detail included. A shopper who knows which claim is being made knows what they are paying for — the authenticity and scarcity of a period piece, or the fit, condition and size range of a modern garment in a period style.

Retro also describes a way of wearing, not just a way of making. Retro dressers typically combine era-signaling pieces — the bell-bottoms, the fedora, the oversized sunglasses — with current clothing, often exaggerating the period elements for effect. That mixing is what separates retro style from historical costume: the reference is meant to be read as a reference, a knowing nod to the 1950s or 1970s inside a contemporary outfit, rather than an attempt to pass as a person of that decade.

The second-hand pages linked from this term — second hand fashion, used clothing, consignment and thrift shops — are where retro and vintage meet in practice, since those channels sell genuine vintage alongside retro reproductions, and the terms decide the pricing. Ripped jeans are a useful borderline case: a pair torn by decades of actual wear is a vintage survivor, while a new pair manufactured with rips is making a retro gesture toward the eras — punk, grunge, heavy metal — that made torn denim a style in the first place.