Yesterday by Tobias Becker

Author:Tobias Becker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

From Revivalism to Presentism

“What’s new in fashion?” asked Suzy Menkes in 1993, advising her readers, “You should be asking, What’s old? … After a decade that celebrated all that was new, shiny and sleek,” she continued, contradicting the self-characterization of the 1980s as a decade of revivals, “old is beautiful.”254 After the 1950s revival in the 1970s and the more limited 1960s revival in the 1980s, pop culture critics did not have to be clairvoyant to expect one of the 1970s in the 1990s. “It’s 1988—and the 1970s are back!” satirist Tony Hendra duly obliged the expectation as early as 1988.255 “The 70’s (Stayin’ Alive) Won’t Die (Stayin’ Alive),” the New York Times declared in 1991, noticing how those “who actually took part in the decade that taste forgot” rather hoped to forget the decade, whereas “many of today’s 70’s revivalists were pre-teen-age, if not toddlers.”256 Like preceding revivals, that of the 1970s was mainly driven by young people, proving wrong those who had prophesied that the 1970s were too marked by revivalism to ever be revived themselves.

The influence of the 1970s was especially apparent in fashion, both in haute couture and, perhaps even more so, in streetwear, where it became more conspicuous as the decade went on, especially with the return of such iconic—and subsequently widely ridiculed and reviled—1970s styles as bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes.257 There was also no dearth of films and television series set in the period, such as Dazed and Confused (1993), Jackie Brown (1997), Boogie Nights (1997), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and That ’70s Show (1998–2006). “Behold! The 1970s! Which happened again in the 1990s,” observed Michael Bracewell, looking back on the decade as it ended.258 For the critic Chuck Klosterman, nostalgia for “the unexperienced seventies” was “central to everything” about the 1990s. But the longing was of a different sort, not like “people of the seventies had longed for the fifties. It was not nostalgia for a time that was more wholesome. It was nostalgia for a time when you could relax and care less.”259 And yet, the prominence of acceleration in the thinking about nostalgia in the 1970s suggests that it was already understood as a yearning for a past retrospectively construed as slower than the present.

In general, both the revival and how it was described followed a well-established formula—with the important difference that the 1980s trend of coexisting and overlapping revivals became even more salient: there was never just one style coming back at any one time. In addition to revivals of more recent styles, the 1950s and 1960s lingered on long after the initial revival had ended or were revived again.260 The “sixties are swinging once again,” observed the Guardian in 1995.261 “London swings! Again!” concurred Vanity Fair in 1997, referring explicitly to the by now legendary 1966 Time article about “Swinging London.” “There’s more than a little self-conscious similarity between London’s 60s and 90s,” it proceeded, “because Britons in their 20s and 30s—the current tastemaking generation—have studied their forebears well.”262

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