Let's do the fashion time warp again

Fifties glamour personified by Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman and (left) revived for Australian Fashion Week this year (right). Kristian Dowling / Getty Images

Well, look at that, what a surprise. The 80s are back again. Or wait, look at those prom skirts - maybe it's the 50s? Hang on, check out the black and white stuff - it must be the 60s all over again. Crikey. It's enough to make even the most seasoned time traveller feel air sick.

All of which makes you want to ask: when will this fashion spin cycle end? Why do designers keep re-using historical looks season after season? And when can we see something new, pretty please?

"I think that to some extent fashion has always recycled ideas," says Charlotte Rust, who together with partner Tony Downing, owns vintage clothing store Fast & Loose.

Because Rust and Downing deliberately seek out more fashion-focused items rather than retro costumes, you'll often find local designers perusing the racks for historical inspiration. So there's always going to be some reference to the past. But over the past few seasons it's been a popular look adapted by the mainstream.

It all started around the turn of the century. Around 2001 a rash of retrospective looks appeared on the runways with labels like Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana resurrecting the 80s glitz and Prada and Calvin Klein reworking the 60s and 70s.

One of the leaders of this movement was Marc Jacobs. At the time a cheeky runway reviewer suggested that some of Jacobs' frocks actually looked like they'd come straight out of an op-shop.

Indeed some items looked as though Jacobs had found the pretty original in a secondhand store, then had it re-made in a modern fabric, with a modern fit, in sizes six to 14.

And that's possibly because this is what happens in various design studios around the world and, yes, even in New Zealand.

Some people don't admire this because it seems a bit like cheating. As one local industry insider puts it you just go into an op-shop, find something and rip it off. That's an easy way of working.

However, there are a variety of ways to access the retro muse. At one end of the scale, you've got designers, like Jacobs, who wear their vintage inspirations boldly. At the other end of the spectrum are frock makers who are simply inspired by a beautiful fabric or the graceful fall of a skirt and who will come up with a garment that's so different you'd never be able to tell what the original inspiration was.

In the middle is the designer who takes pieces of vintage garments - a pocket here and a hemline there - and cleverly throws the lot together in a modern way to come up with something original.

There are also designers who take old clothes, hack them up, add or subtract fabric and turn a garment into something new - Martin Margiela's Artisanal collection fits into this category as do various bits from local label Nom*D.

So rather than moaning about that we've seen it all before, perhaps we should ask this: when are we going to run out of retro?

"I remember one of our lecturers at fashion school telling us that ever since Elizabethan times fashion has always gone back and borrowed from history, and as time's gone on, the decades that fashion borrows from have come closer and closer," says Miss Crabb designer Kristine Crabb.

"There's almost some 90s stuff around now and that was only a few years ago. So I'm not sure what's going to happen. I think it's really eclectic and that anything goes; we can wear whatever we want, whenever we want, to go anywhere. So I think it's probably going to come down to [niche] markets rather than trends."

Which means some folk will always want to wear retro-inspired outfits and others will prefer more radical shapes and styles. Vintage clothing store owner Rust believes that the focus will just keep on shifting. "The whole boho thing had a very 70s feel. Now there seems to be more focus on the 60s and the 80s. But it's not like 60s ready-to-wear, it's more like 60s couture. And it doesn't look dated because it has been interpreted in a different way."

There are labels, like Rick Owens, in Paris, or Britain's Boudicca, she says, "where the designers don't seem to reference any particular time. They concentrate on their own shapes and developing their own themes."