In avant-garde artistic, literary and design circles, futurism is a long-standing and well-established term. Retrofuturism builds on ideas of futurism, but the latter term functions differently in several different contexts. Critic Pauline Kael writes, ' presents a retro-futurist fantasy.' Historiography In an example more related to retrofuturism as an exploration of past visions of the future, the term appears in the form of “retro-futurist” in a 1984 review of the film Brazil in The New Yorker. The ad talks of jewellery that is 'silverized steel and sleek grey linked for a retro-futuristic look'. The word retrofuturism is formed by the addition of the prefix 'retro' from the Latin language, which gives the meaning of 'backwards' to the word 'future', a word also originating from Latin.Īccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, an early use of the term appears in a Bloomingdales advertisement in a 1983 issue of The New York Times. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retrofuturism can be seen as 'an animating perspective on the world'. Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned ' retro styles' with futuristic technology, retrofuturism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. If futurism is sometimes called a 'science' bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation.

Retrofuturism (adjective retrofuturistic or retrofuture) is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. Sailing ship airborne ('White Cruiser of the clouds'), 1902

All nostalgia appliances