I was at a music festival this weekend, feeling very out of place (One of these is not like the others! One of these does not belong! Look at my little picture on the left! That haircut looks sure natural at Woodstock!), and I realized something.

While floating like a depressed trout trying to move upstream among the swaths of old Milwaukee’s Best novelty T-shirts and secondhand trucker hats, it came to me — we’re living in the Age of the Fauxback.

The rise of clothing stores like Mitchell & Ness and Urban Outfitters have thrown us into this strange pseudo-era that’s a Skrillex-sprinkled mashup of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and custom Chuck Taylors.

At some point around 2005 we ran out of stuff to wear and started dipping into the nostalgia file. Case in point: Wasn’t it like three years ago that snapback hats were considered to be cheap pieces of crap? I had at least five of them from my long and storied Little League career and immediately threw them out because when I was 11, well, they were cheap pieces of crap.

Had I known they would become priceless ironic fashion pieces that would be worth thousands of “Sweet hat, bro!” compliments a year, I would have hung onto them.

But at least those little chunks of halcyon throwback are earned. The problem is that now we’re trying to reproduce that vintage feel with items that are actually brand new.

I have a New England Patriots shirt that’s soft and faded with the old Pat Patriot logo; it looks like it was made in 1965. In reality, I paid $40 about a year ago to buy it out of a vending machine in an airport.

By the way, sign we’re living in the future? T-shirt vending machine. Crazy, man.

I don’t think there’s ever been another point in the past hundred years when people have been purposefully wearing stuff made to look older to feel like we’re in the now. It almost seems like we’re at the point where the throwback has overtaken the new and shiny as the majority.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t really know. But it sure doesn’t seem like a good sign if we’re looking back fondly to the sartorial sense of the 1970s. We’re supposed to keep moving forward, making new, different stuff, aren’t we?

No, Kanye shutter shades don’t count. Those are just idiotic.

Then again, maybe we’ve reached our limits in terms of creativity and taste. That might not be so bad. Maybe Lady Gaga is trying to serve as a cautionary tale more than anything else. Maybe wearing sides of bacon really is all that’s left.

Until we reach that day, I guess it’s all right for all of us to compliment each other on our classic Sesame Street shirts and Pier One refrigerator magnets of old World War II propaganda posters. I’ll just keep on joining you all at music festivals, a sad trout against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. As a trout.

Kevin Slack is a senior television, radio and film major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at khslack@syr.edu.

Published on October 16, 2012 at 2:51 am