What Goes Around Comes Around

Two winters ago, fashion blogger Betsy Lowther did the unthinkable. She wore her prom dress to a holiday party, more than 12 years after the big night. Except this time, instead of being paired with a wrist corsage and cheap silver sandals, it was layered over a black turtleneck with opaque tights. "It's hard to get over the stigma that you did wear this during your unfashionable youth," says Lowther, who runs the blog FashionIsSpinach.com. "But suddenly it was cool again." (Article continued below...)

 

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Though she loved the royal blue sequined minidress when she wore it to her 1995 high-school dance—she wasn't the only one; five other girls sported similar dresses—it was relegated to the back of a closet at her parents' house for years, deemed dated and too flashy. When variations of the dress started to pop up at retailers like French Connection, Topshop, and Theory, she couldn't believe it. "The dress could have been hanging on a rack in a store," she says. "It was pretty amazing to me that suddenly everyone was wearing my prom dress around."

Recycling fashion trends from eras past isn't a new idea. It was around in Napoleon's day, when his wife, Empress Josephine, wore filmy white dresses that harked back to classical Greece and Rome, says Beth Dincuff Charleston, a fashion-history professor at Parsons, the New School for Design in New York. "That has gone on for a very long time," she says. "It happens before the 19th century, but you see it in almost every decade of 19th century."

What is new is the pace. In the 1800s, designers often pulled inspiration from looks of a century before, Charleston says. In the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, retro revivals cycled with about 30 years between the original trend and revisited fashion. Since the late '90s, fashions are going from in to outdated to in again more quickly, in less than 20 years.

Modern fashion, which Charleston estimates can be marked by the opening of the House of Chanel and the inception of sportswear in 1913, is shaped throughout its history by retro influences. In the 1920s, designer Jeanne Lanvin alluded to the romanticism of the 18th century with her "robe de style," a full-skirted feminine silhouette that relied on supports like petticoats and hoops to maintain its volume. From about 1931 to 1939, designer Madeleine Vionnet followed Josephine's lead, looking back to Greek sculpture for draped eveningwear. In 1947, Christian Dior debuted the "New Look," a cinched-waist, full-skirted style that Charleston terms a "total throwback to the 1860s." The hourglass silhouette kept women in corsets until 1961.