Several fields have adopted the term retro from the design world. Since the 1980s the implications of the word ‘retro’ have been expanding in the application to different media. The desire to capture something from the past and evoke nostalgia is fuelled by dissatisfaction with the present.
Retro shows nostalgia with a dose of cynicism and detachment. The concept of nostalgia is linked to retro, but the bittersweet desire for things, persons, and situations of the past has an ironic stance in retro style. Different from more traditional forms of revivalism, "retro" suggests a half ironic, half longing consideration of the recent past it has been called an "unsentimental nostalgia", recalling modern forms that are no longer current. It suggests a fundamental shift in the way we relate to the past. Most commonly retro is used to describe objects and attitudes from the recent past that never seem modern. In Simulacra and Simulation, French theorist Jean Baudrillard describes retro as a demythologization of the past, distancing the present from the big ideas that drove the modern age. Shortly thereafter retro was introduced into English by the fashion and culture press, where it suggests a rather cynical revival of older but relatively recent fashions. The term rétro was soon applied to nostalgic French fashions that recalled the same period. The French mode rétro of the 1970s reappraised in film and novels the conduct of French civilians during the Nazi occupation. In France, the word rétro, an abbreviation for rétrospectif, gained cultural currency with reevaluations of Charles de Gaulle and France's role in World War II. The English word retro derives from the Latin prefix retro, meaning backwards, or in past times. Unlike the historicism of the Romantic generations, it is mostly the recent past that retro seeks to recapitulate, focusing on the products, fashions and artistic styles produced since the Industrial Revolution, the successive styles of Modernity.
Retro style refers to new things that display characteristics of the past. But on the other hand, many people use the term to categorize styles that have been created in the past. The term retro has been in use since 1972 to describe on the one hand, new artifacts that self-consciously refer to particular modes, motifs, techniques, and materials of the past. 2.6.1 Film, music, fashion, and television.2.3 Graphic design, typography, and packaging.