Those Who Remember The Past Are Doomed To Reheat It

And to think that I just dropped off a bunch of horrible stuff at the Goodwill. “Faster nostalgia” is the first sign of a sick culture:

In tribute to the year 1992, an elevated D.J. segued through records by erstwhile hip-hop artists like K-Solo and Apache and into dance music by Color Me Badd and Bobby Brown, while members of the crowd swarmed the bar and contorted in dated dance steps. Some participants took the theme particularly seriously, wearing vintage Polo sweaters, retro Air Jordan sneakers and chunky gold door knocker earrings.

A celebration of the urban culture of the early 1990s, the monthly party is known simply as 1992. Bouncing around downtown Manhattan clubs since August 2006, it has attracted celebrity guests like Jay-Z, the producer Jermaine Dupri and the music mogul Andre Harrell. Europeans, hankering for a slice of retrograde Americana, have taken the party to Paris and Amsterdam.

“If you don’t know the past, you’ll just follow the trends that are going on now,” said Stephen Barr, 26, of West Hempstead, N.Y., a designer of T-shirts that coordinate with Nike SB skateboarding sneakers. Tall, burly and bearded, he wore a vintage Polo ski jacket with a “1992” patch on the breast pocket. A party regular, he said, “It’s more about camaraderie than meeting girls and all that stuff.”

While the shimmering synthesizers, leg warmers and asymmetrical New Wave haircuts of the 1980s have been alternatively ridiculed, revered and replicated, the early 1990s have remained an untapped source of retro lodestone.

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Just as Mick Jagger’s skin-tight pants were resurrected as skinny jeans, fashions of the early 1990s find new life at the 1992 party. Revelers in their late 20s and early 30s in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren Polo mix with recent Fashion Institute of Technology grads in neon-colored jeans.

Retro-oriented scenes often wink at the cartoonish aspects of the era they celebrate, but there is little irony here. “The early ’90 was the last good style moment in the past 10, 15 years,” said James Filsaime, a 20-year-old from Brooklyn who wore a pink, orange and green Sergio Tacchini windbreaker and turquoise jeans he admitted were “actually from 1991.”