I rarely go to large shopping malls. Perhaps two or three times a year I'll need to go, generally to buy clothes or to visit a certain shop located in a mall. I do visit malls during the Christmas season because I'm frequently at a loss for what to get some people on my list. Usually, my mom and dad turn out to be the hardest to buy for, and for some reason it always helps just to "go to the mall." For me, I think the wandering around bit is what helps to spark my imagination.

So this past Sunday Rhonelle and I went to the mall. And while I did successfully finish my Christmas shopping there, what struck me was how out of touch I must be with current fashions. Of course malls are excellent people-watching locations, and not being a mall rat myself I don't get to experience people-watching at the mall very often. Sunday, though, I was really struck by one overriding concept: retro. By that I mean that I was struck at how much the concept of history has developed, to the point that so many young people really do live in an era when their contemporary culture is so profoundly influenced by ideas, styles, and expressions from previous generations and decades. I know I'm beginning to sound fuddy-duddy, but this isn't a rant.

We ducked in to Macy's so Rhonelle could return something and as she took care of that I looked around. We happened to be in the "young miss" section, and I dare say there were hardly any outfits for sale that hadn't been on sale years ago. At this particular Macy's the 1970s were very much "in." Of course, the 1970s have been "in" since the late 1990s when the cliché about the seventies being a decade of terrible taste (full of browns and greens and horizontal stripes) came into vogue. And with that image of the seventies came a distinct hipness for those people born after that decade. The 1970s were the years that first defined the individual identities of many parents of 1990s young people. In other words, for kids in the late 1990s exploring what it meant to be a teenager meant looking to the styles experienced by their parents' own exploration. So in Macy's on Sunday I saw a lot of flagrant bell bottoms, ivory-buttoned shirts, and tall shoes. Interestingly, these were also mixed with the Brittany Spears extremely low-cut denim jeans on the next rack.

Even more interesting was our visits to Urban Outfitter (which isn't in the mall, but is nearby on the 3rd St. Promenade, where, incidentally we saw a Chinese man flipping bowls and other utensils onto his head by way of his feet. He closed his act by first placing a tea pot on his head [with his hands] then flipping the lid up to the pot with his feet, followed immediately by his leaning forward to pour the tea into a cup he held in his mouth via a little contraption. Most impressive!) and Hot Topic. Urban Outfitter is a semiotician's dream because of how it constantly redefines what it means by the concept of "urban." More to the point at hand, "urban" seems recently to have come to mean "retro." Not only did we see ladies hats and purses from the 1920s through the 1950s, but the entire store was filled with t-shirts from the 1970s. Of course the store carried the ubiquitous trucker hats, which appeal to a combination of appropriated social class and decade, but it was the t-shirts that most interested me. And then I remembered reading something in the L.A. Times about the gift-giving habits of celebrities, and someone mentioned retro concert t-shirts. Sure enough, Urban Outfitter had some Led Zeppelin concert t-shirts from the 1970s (don't remember which tour though). They also had newly manufactured versions of an old hand-held football game my brother and I used to play in the mid-1980s. $20. It probably cost $20 in 1985, but when you pay $20 for it in 2003 you're paying for soooo much more than just a bunch of tiny red blinky lights meant to stand for big tough football players (by the way, my brother and I owned that game. We just couldn't lose after a while). But it was the concert t-shirts that interested me the most, and I realized my brother Danny would love one of those things because 1970s retro is actually one of his styles.

So off to Hot Topic, because I know they sell music t-shirts, and I'm hoping they've got something like an early-1980s David Lee Roth-era Van Halen shirt. Unfortunately, they didn't have any Van Halen (at least not on that day), but they did have a great deal of old shirts. Obviously the shirts themselves weren't old, just the design. For instance, there was a Metallica shirt with a picture of the band from 1983, a Mötley Crüe shirt from 1983, as well as dozens of t-shirts emblazoned with logos and graphics of 1980s kids television shows. These shows, of course, were watched by the buyers of the t-shirt and this puts a slightly different spin on the concept of "retro." In the case of the kids television shows, the message of the t-shirt is "hey, did you watch XXX when you were a kid? Wasn't it rad?" Like the allure of 1980s children for the 1970s, television shows carry with them nostalgia. In combination (by wearing, say bell bottoms and a You Can't Do That On TV t-shirt) they make for an almost frightening amount of nostalgia though. So much so that the fashion component of these kids' self-image is about living in the past. The music young people buy, while not completely immune to a fetishization of the past, doesn't suffer from this nostalgia nearly so much. But the visual image of "hip" in the stores we visited is intimately connected with "past."

I am not surprised at this general concept of retro. What does surprise me is the intensity of it, and the fact that the intensity has grown exponentially in so short a time. The retro concert t-shirts is a perfect example of the "intensifying intensity" because concert t-shirts have always been over-priced gimmicks that are of poor quality and are quickly outgrown (literally, people get older and fatter and can't fit into them anymore). But with companies licensing old designs there is no longer a limit to what can be rebranded and resold. Culture companies (clothing, music, movies, etc.) are now able to go through every product they've ever created and resell it to a demographic whose idea of "now" is "yesteryear." I can't imagine what will come next, but I certainly won't be surprised.