Where does the word ‘retro’ come from? According to the design historian Elizabeth Guffey, the term entered common parlance in the early sixties as a linguistic spin-off of the Space Age. Retro rockets provided reverse thrust and slowed a spaceship’s propulsion. The connection of ‘retro’ to the era of sputnik and the space race lends itself to an appealing analogy: retro as the cultural counterpart to ‘reverse thrust’, with nostalgia and revivalism emerging in the seventies as a reaction against the sixties’ full-tilt surge into the ‘out there’.
As attractive as this notion is, though, it seems more likely that ‘retro’ came into use as a detached prefix that had gotten unstuck from ‘retrospection’, ‘retrograde’, ‘retrogressive’ and similar words. Terms starting with ‘retro’ tend to have a negative connotation, whereas ‘pro’ is attached to words like ‘progress’. Retro itself is something of a dirty word. Few people like to be associated with it. The most bizarre example of this is the tragic story of Birmingham pub landlord Donald Cameron, who com“mitted suicide in 1998 when owner Bass Breweries decided to convert his establishment into a retro theme pub called Flares. At the inquest, his ex-wife Carol talked about how the humiliating prospect of ‘wearing a seventies outfit and a wig’ plunged Cameron into despair. ‘He felt he could not deal with any trouble in the pub. People would laugh at him because he looked ludicrous.’ A few days after being reprimanded by his Bass bosses for obstinately turning up for work in his sharp nineties suit and tie, the thirty-nine-year-old father of two asphyxiated himself in his car.
—Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past
