“Retro” can be used to simply mean “old fashioned” or old, functioning much like “timeless” or “classic”. It has also been associated with modernism in the immediate post-war years, encompassing an aesthetic that ranges from tailfins on Cadillacs to ranch houses. Sometimes, it can also suggest an entire outlook on life, for example, social conservatism, home schooling or the embrace of traditional gender roles. “Retro” can also be applied to forms of technological obsolescence, for example, manual typewriters, cash registers, bulky hand-held cell phones, or the resurrection of old computer games. But most commonly, “retro” is used to describe objects and attitudes from the recent past that no longer seem “modern.” It suggests a fundamental shift in the way we relate to the past. Different from more traditional forms of revivalism, “retro” suggests a half ironic, half longing consideration of the recent past. It has been called an “unsentimental nostalgia,” recalling “modern” forms that are no longer current. "Retro" sometimes also refers to the fifties era.

Today it is often used in a positive sense, referring to quirky or attractive products that are no longer available. For example, "Retro fashion" or "Retro Chic" may consist of outdated styles, such as tie-dyed shirts from the 1960s, or poodle skirts from the 1950s. A love of retro objects (things from the past) is called retrophilia.

Retro often reflects a sensibility aligned with camp. Camp is an ironic attitude, an explicit re-introduction of non-dominant forms.

Retro also can mean a type of music like Hip Hop.

Origin

“Retro” has long been used as a prefix, intended to suggest that which is past or derivative. In the postwar period, it increased in usage with the advent of retrorockets used by the US space program in the 1950s and 1960s. It gained cultural currency with French reevaluations of Charles de Gaulle and that country’s role in World War II. The French mode retro of the 1970s reappraised in film and novels the conduct of French civilians during the Nazi occupation. The term “retro” was soon applied to nostalgic French fashions that recalled the same period.

Shortly it was coined into English by the fashion and culture press, where it suggests a rather cynical revival of older but relatively recent fashions. (Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival, pp. 9-22). In Simulacra and Simulation, French theorist Jean Baudrillard describes retro as a demythologization of the past, distancing the present from the big ideas that drove the “modern” age (Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 43).