The Story Behind

The retro design serves like a creative candy into our eyes and is short terms for retrospective. Colorful pop art and 1950's sitcom references were incorporates alongside with the humor in design that forms Retro. Retro designs are often reminiscent of the big movie sets of classic black and white films. Retro designs truly are timeless masterpieces as it reflects the idealism of age, a sense of strong survival in terms of their sleek and stylish. Moreover, Retro Designs came out of a desire to leave the highly ornamented Victorian style behind and to replace it with an uncluttered look. Yet in today’s general views of art, pretty much everything has been done at least once or twice, from the styles, art direction, color usage and even retro fonts and the only thing left for us to do is to pick up a piece from the past and further improvise it in order to produce what I called a modern interpretation for Retro. And in this ever-changing world, retro designs have already proven its strength, where changes are made to express the current world’s desire.

The current interest of retro that concentrate specifically between the 1960’s and 1980’s design turned out to be the most influential movement to the twentieth century either the design, music revolution or advertising and products and this is because retro has been a part of searching for meaning. Retro in theory is a hard to defined concepts for its vagueness. And since there isn’t any specific proven timeline and origins of the history, most of us started to presume that retro actually refers to any timeline that features a renewal. Therefore, it is absurdly important to have a clear head onwards the modern retro and the retro design as they stood for a very difference audience and perspective. And most retro creation are actually modern retro, where Neil Bingham a curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, together with Andrew Weaving, an interior designer who has also written features on ‘retro’ style for Elle decoration and Metropolitan, once quoted,

‘Modern Retro delights in combining authentic pieces with renditions of the works of classic twentieth century masters and items by today’s best designers.’

The following definition, by art critic Guy Julier, places the term ‘retro’ in the 1960s, when popular culture was developing:

‘Retro is a term used frequently to describe the popular re-edition from the early 1960’s of Victoriana, arts and crafts, art noveau and contemporary style designs.’

Julier’s definition contrasts with Oliver Bennett’s definition, which although covering a thirty year period, locates the beginning of ‘retro’.in the 1920s:

‘Retro is an indeterminate style which can veer from the 20s to the 50s in one stylistic leap.’

The present preference or trend in design that revolves around Retro elements from the 1950s to 1970s was particularly noticeable at the end of the 20th century. This phenomenon, known as ‘fin de siecle’ features a nostalgic desire for styles from the century which is drawing to a close:

‘In the fine arts, architecture and crafts, forms such as neo-gothic, neo-renaissance and neo baroque flourished and were often combined to form a hybrid stylistic mishmash.’

According to Meyer’s Encyclopedia this copying of old forms was:

‘The expression of an attitude to style that sought its own nature in historical borrowings.’

The preference to rely on designs from the past could both be due to the fear of the unknown in the century to come, and the strong pull of nostalgia in not wanting change and this indirectly produce the modern retro that occurred at the end of the 19th century. Judith Brauner, marketing executiveof Vitra, has seen this desire for continuity developing within consumers who buy ‘retro’ products.

‘We have noticed that the greater the uncertainty about current design, the more people shift towards the tried and tested, because it stands for security.’

The 1960s was an optimistic decade of social change famously known as the decade of sex, drugs and rock’n’ roll:

‘The suburban dream of the fifties was renounced in favor of a utopian vision of alternative lifestyle, and the young continued to agitate for a better world.

Whereas as the space age strike around 1957, the dream of a man setting foot on earth exposed the world design to a higher level of explosiveness.

“Why does the ‘retro’ phenomenon locate most of its original designs and styles in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s? Research shows that it was because the 1950s was an interesting decade when the post-war generation had the freedom to reassert its identity. By the end of this decade the modern movement, or modernism, was being rejected in favor of post modernism, enabling post-modernism to establish itself in the 1960s. The general aesthetics of modernism, which entailed the use of steel frames with concrete and glass infillings in architecture, and tubular steel and plywood in furniture, along with the use of abstraction and suppression of ornament and colour and the exposure of structure, were being forgotten with the increasing momentum towards post-modernism. In general post-modernism had a more sensuous approach to design. Its fresh approach embraced bulbous and organic shapes, and fluorescent and gaudy colours and included a more exciting and fun approach to design. This kind of design was the exact antithesis of modernism. In the 1950s young people began demonstrating against the Bomb as well as experiencing, in relative terms, newfound prosperity in the suburban dream. The rich explosion of popular culture and the momentum of the market place, which began in the late 1950s and continued into the 1960s, gave form to collective moods and needs and translated those needs into consumers’ materialistic ambitions.” -John Treby, University of Herdfordshire.

That is for a better understanding of so called Retro Design.-Zheng Joo