Recently, it seems as though everything around me is calling me to look to the past. I would go through my mother’s photos of college and long for the bell-bottoms of the 70s, or find new vinyl records of raspy jazz singers from the 40s or listen to stories of my elder’s booming younger lives of the 60s. The call for me to look on the past century has never been stronger.

This longing for the past leads me to believe I was almost certainly meant to live in another era and that I got stuck in this one by some sort of accident. My friends know me as the girl who treasures old things and who thinks wistfully about the golden age. They know I like wearing tea-length dresses better than short shorts, or that I prefer Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra over anything on the radio today. However, I’m also quite often told that I don’t appear to be from strictly one era or one time period, but from several different time periods all crammed together into one new sense of style.

While this is partially due to the fact that I really just can’t decide which era is my favorite to mimic, it’s also something I do with intention. I purposely try to draw from several eras’ styles so as to create my very own.

Now, I don’t want to pretend like I invented the idea of “vintage” or of being inspired by fashion history, because I absolutely didn’t. In fact, my generation seems to be quite fascinated with it. Dressing from the past is only one of many ways to set yourself apart from the crowd so as to not look completely ordinary — something our culture is obsessed with. To be vintage is to be unique, and who doesn’t want to be unique?

However, I wonder what exactly this means for our own era’s taste in fashion. I don’t think any generation before us has been as obsessed with the past as ours is. I sometimes fear this appeal to vintage fashion and culture doesn’t come from a place of respect for the past so much as from open discontent and disgust with the present — an attitude I don’t believe to be wholesome.

I often think about how our era will be remembered as we remember those which came before ours. What outfit will they consider a classic 2010's outfit? What music will they say is typical 2010's party music? Obviously, just as we don’t take in everything that passed through the 60s, we’ll only be remembered by the fashion and music that stand the tests of time. But, because our generation is so obsessed with longing for the past, what will they say about our creativity and our progression? Will they say we merely tried to copy a generation because we couldn’t come up with anything by ourselves? I fear this may be the case.

I realize our generation has a lot to offer that we didn’t steal from past eras, and I also realize we can’t truly create something brand new that has no connection to the past, but I still think we could be doing more. You see, the reason I try to draw from several different eras’ tastes is to avoid purely mimicking the past without actually accepting the age I do live in. I don’t only wear tea-length dresses, and I don’t only listen to Billie Holiday. But I do find those things rather inspiring and try to incorporate their beauty wherever I can. There is a way to be inspired by the by the rock culture of the 70s and the pin-up hairdos of the 50s without simply copying them. We can’t do the past justice by merely copying it.

I believe the best way to show how inspired you are by the past is not through blatant mimicry of it, but through drawing from its styles in order to create a modern adaptation. We have the whole history of our planet to draw inspiration from, why pick just one era or just one style? Why not use our ability to look on the past so that we might pick out all its best features and create an entirely new appreciation of it that exists presently? Stop imitating the past, and start being inspired by it. After all, it’s not as though things stop being beautiful simply because the times change or they go "out of style." The things from the past that are truly beautiful are still beautiful and are worthy of being admired.

So I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I wasn’t meant to be born in a different era. Maybe I was meant to be in exactly this one so that I might better appreciate the ones that came before it. What better place to look at the entirety of history than from the present?