"Dan Fox: Pop music has always been tied up with fashion, but its retro impulse has now become deeply enmeshed in lifestyle choices. Retro has become a surface indicator of urban gentrification; drinking in coffee shops or bars with a certain aesthetic, such as the pseudo-1920s speakeasy thing that’s popular in New York. A recent hipster look here for men has been a sort of American Victoriana style: moustaches or huge beards, plain white shirts and trousers held up with braces. Although it perhaps evolved from the freak folk music scene, and the bucolic homesteader look of Will Oldham et al, it also seems strongly associated with an interest in locavore food culture and fascination with artisanal manufacture. It seems less about affinity to musical style tribes, and more about lifestyle affinities.

Simon Reynolds: There is something about old stuff and its relationship to class and it’s funny to see a younger generation of middle-class culture replicating similar things to their parents; instead of collecting antiques they collect things like, say, manual typewriters, to use as a decorative item in their living room. I recently watched a documentary that involved the late artist Margaret Kilgallen, who talked about using old artwork and fonts associated with bygone advertising and commercial signs. She said she was interested in this stuff as soon as she felt it wasn’t selling anything to her; as soon as something ceases to be related to commerce in the present, it becomes more charming. Same with the hipsters who are interested in mainstream ’80s music; as soon as it stops being the stuff sold through mainstream radio, it starts to seem exotic. The whole idea of ‘vintage’ is about how something once associated with mass-production later gets used as a way of identifying yourself as a discerning and sophisticated individual."