the big wave of retro brands
the 80s ads, the apple fonts, the dispo cam, and the new balance sneakers. why are there so many retro brands and are they sustainable?
I’ve been fascinated by brands with a retro vibe for a long time now. From early Dispo committing to the disposable camera bit with rolls that develop the next day to Poolsuite taking tech twitter and mainstream beauty magazines by storm with everything from Poolsuite FM to sunscreen that smells, looks and feels like the 80s. Every once in a while, someone drops a retro UX design for a modern app and the crowd goes wild. One time, I found an early internet website that some guy in the UK made for his car, because I mistyped the url of my college’s student portal, spent hours poking around it, and ended up dropping a merch line inspired by it.
Retro feels good. But it keeps me wondering whether the joy that retro-styled campaigns, brands, and products bring us are sustainable long-term. Dispo, for instance, was an interesting experiment to me because it recreated some elements of the photography experience that most people are not used to - like not being able to see the pictures you are taking right away and having to wait until the next day to get them “developed”.
When done well, retro-inspired “inefficiencies” like this make you pause and evaluate the modern way of doing things. For the past few years, I’ve been taking pictures to post them on social media - I’d be lying if I said that taking them for memories or myself came first. Taking pictures on film is freeing in a lot of ways. Sure, I still take pictures on my phone but I now love bringing a disposable camera to vacations, events and random outings even though my friends love to complain that they won’t see the pictures I take for a while. Since I can’t see the pictures I take, I don’t try to retake them to get a better angle. Also, by the time I get my film developed, I don’t even remember what’s on it, so it’s always a Christmas morning when I get an email from Eliz Digital in Chinatown. But just because I keep buying disposable cameras, does it mean that someone can get me to log into a modern day phone app that recreates at least some of the elements of that retro experience every day and maybe even ditch other camera and social media apps? At what point does the joy that comes with the old way of doing things outweigh the efficiency and the innovation that come with the new ways?
There are a few ways in which companies do retro. Some of them, like Vacation Inc. make retro their whole personality. With meticulous attention to detail, they replicate the best parts of the 80s family tropical vacation and the preppy summer break. The packaging, the ads, the outdated language, the banana sunscreen scent and most importantly, the humor that comes with all of it, transport you right back to the 80s five-star resort. Like me, you don’t even have to have been alive in the 80s to feel it. When you remove the mustaches, the crazy hair and other 80s decorations, what you are left with are memories of having a beach day with your parents and friends and the times being simpler. It is retro but it’s also sophisticated, fuzzy, and funny in a very subtle way, and it definitely stands out from other brands in the same category that makes you feel nothing other than the fear of getting skin cancer.
I get similar feelings when I scroll through Aime Leon Dore Instagram but in a broader, less obvious way, more timeless way. It’s old New York but also European summer, the neighborhood you grew up in but also a brief escape. Sure, some of their ads replicate the 80s ads but they are less in your face about it. It is a cool modern brand that nods to and takes a lot of inspiration from the culture that came before it, like many other fashion brands.
For brands like this, retro is a big part of who they are, their story, and the reason why they resonate with their audience. Retro here is cohesive, timeless, and elevated.
Then there are brands, like Nike and New Balance whose brands has evolved over the years and even though they fully cater to a modern mass market, retro-styled collaborations like the one Nike did with Tom Sachs or New Balance’s ongoing collaboration with Aime Leon Dore make sense because they are a nod to Nike’s and New Balance’s long history.
Sometimes though, brands treat retro culture as one of the short-lived trend cycles that emerge on TikTok and run confusing retro-inspired campaigns, like Skim’s ‘not your mother’s stockings.” Don’t get me wrong, Skims Y2K campaign that brought the 2000s Kim and Paris duo back together in Juicy Couture-inspired tracksuits was iconic because Skims’ and Kim’s personal brand are indivisible. But when it comes to their 80s-style stockings campaign, things start to feel out of place. Even though hosiery and shapewear by themselves are old-school and conservative, the key thing that makes them cool, modern and shameless is the fact that Kim is the face of the brand. But also - using the 80s look in an ad that wishes to disconnect from the past is just confusing.
Similar story happens when millennial DTC brands run 80s-style campaigns. What this sneaker ad, this Muade ad and this Pleo ad have in common is that they feel very out of place within their overall brands. It feels like someone on the team got inspired by the retro ad aesthetic and wanted to make one. Even though the retro aesthetic is there, it works against these companies. If I discovered the R.A.D. sneaker via this 80s ad and clicked through to their Instagram and saw a grid that’s all over the place, it would discourage me from making the purchase. Maude is trying very hard to make the retro romance and class work for them by posting clips and pictures from black and white movies but ultimately, their product is so modern, clean and millennial that it feels out of place. With Pleo, the messaging gets confusing because their product is inherently modern and built to take away the old-school accounting inefficiencies.
Retro feels good. It’s tempting to seek an escape in simpler times when housing prices keep going up, inflation is rising, active wars are happening around the world, and all of that is right in front of our eyes on a tiny screen. There is a reason why we parted ways with the old ways of doing things but they are always there, reminding us of their best parts, asking us to take a step back and reflect on the new ways, how they make us feel and think about how we should strive to move forward. Replicating the past exactly the way it used to be, just like calling for a complete disconnect isn’t the answer, especially when it’s driven by trend cycles, blanket assumptions that marketers make about generational preferences, and corporate sales. A true master is able to carry the best part of the past and effortlessly give them a new life in the present in a way that not only makes us melt down in nostalgia but also nudges us to be excited about the future.
Loved this post, + I agree that exact reuse of past stuff feels super vapid/risks rehashing old stuff in a way that becomes inescapable—I think about 'hauntology' of the past + this quote from Mark Fisher/Robin Mackay's piece (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_pomo.htm) about 'pomophobia':
"What Cobain's weighed down by above all is the dead heaviness of the past, the overwhelming sense that everything has already been done. When Kurt Cobain first heard the punk records that would excite and inspire him, they were already old news, the fading afterglow of long-extinct stars. He lived, he always knew, in the arid cultural interregnum that Jameson, referring to an ostensibly very different cultural sphere, called "a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past." (PCS 18)
There was a really great post that followed right after SOPHIE's death also about 'anti-hauntology' and moving beyond stylistic futurism and into stuff that legitimately innovates with new techniques—I found it (https://bluelabyrinths.com/2021/02/02/anti-hauntology-mark-fisher-sophie-and-the-music-of-the-future/) super encouraging/energizing:
"When we listen to an artist like Sophie, regardless of our personal opinion of her music, it’s hard to imagine that she would fail to induce ‘future shock’ in listeners from 20 years ago. Sophie’s music exists on the boundaries of what could even be considered popular music. We might say that blend of the abrasive and the angelic exists solely to subvert the expectations of the listener. Fisher’s conclusion that a contemporary song wouldn’t produce any ‘jolt’ in an audience of the past seems almost absurd when we consider a track like Faceshopping...Both the visual and auditory aesthetics of this video have been created to provide a sense of future shock in the listener. These are not cultural forms of the past ominously haunting the present, these are images of a virtual future being rendered into contemporary culture. This is something unlike anything we’ve seen before. This is anti-hauntology."
Anyways great post + I am excited to read more!