There is an awkward period in the lives of clothes, furniture and writers, when they become something more than dated but something less than a piece of history. We call things that have reached this state 'unfashionable', and usually throw such stuff away without thinking any more about it. Everyone sees a 1960s sideboard or a 1980s haircut as dated, and, beyond an embarrassed smile at our folly for ever having admired such cheesy horrors, these things rarely give rise to any thought. But unfashionable things are much more complicated and intriguing phenomena than they might appear. They open a gap in our ways of perceiving because they fall between our aesthetic and our historical sense. When we look at unfashionable objects our senses tell us that an age has passed, but we don't yet have a means of giving those things the benefit of a historical perspective. The unfashionable embarrasses us - how can I have worn that? - but when the first blush is over it should challenge us to think about how our tastes are made and why they change.

LRB 9 February 2006 | PDF Download