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"Does anyone...still wear...a hat?"
Joanne, Company, "The Ladies Who Lunch"

Fashion is merciless. It beguiles kings and makes them slaves. It should come as no surprise that in the space of years (if not months) a perfectly fashionable dress or suit can go from tres chic to horrible; what is surprising is when someone keeps wearing said outfit... for over fifty years!

No, this is not the White-Dwarf Starlet, but rather a character who is identified with a type of outfit (or just one) and have kept the look for far too many years without getting an update. This is common in Comic Books where the story is set in the "Present Day" and the clothes become hilariously anachronistic.

If they ever do get some new duds, expect much poking fun at their hilarious past fashion sense, while said character adamantly maintains the look is "still cool!" and it's the world that's out of touch. On the flip side, if the outdated outfit has become an intrinsically linked part of the person's image, it can lead to fans crying that they should have stuck with the old clothes.

See also Grandfather Clause. Compare Awesome Anachronistic Apparel, where a character's clothes are so cool that, while they may be out of fashion, they are certainly never out of style.

See also Unintentional Period Piece and Popularity Polynomial. I Was Quite a Fashion Victim is what happens when a character does move on and is horrified by their previous costume. Refugee from Time is a similar phenomenon applied to a character's backstory or origins, while Disco Dan is this but applied to a character's whole personality.

Contrast Fashions Never Change and No New Fashions in the Future.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 

    Comic Books 
The DCU
  • Superman:
    • Jimmy Olsen sometimes still wears a blazer and bowtie. Poked fun at in All-Star Superman, when Jimmy is voted worst dressed man in Metropolis. In that series, he also takes a shine to "Kryptonian Overpants". This trope changes depending on the decade, as blazers and bow-ties have gone in-and-out of style since Jimmy's debut.
    • Superman himself. The "shorts over tights" thing was actually the outfit worn by athletes in the early 20th century and heavily associated with circus strongmen. So the "classic super-hero look" is actually over a century old. (And ironically the way that spandex outfits are sometimes worn with shorts brings the whole trope full-circle, with reality becoming fiction becoming reality again.)
    • Supergirl wears a skirt because she was inspired by Otto Binder's earlier creation Mary Marvel, who in turn was inspired by female figure skaters. By the late 60's, though, a skirt-wearing heroine was seen like outdated, leading to debates among comic fans who think a skirt-wearing flying female hero is stupid and impractical, and fans who point out that her skirt costume is iconic at this point, she usually wears shorts underneath -thus denying the fanservice angle-, and super-hero costumes are not practical anyway.
    • Some attempts to modernize her looks became dated almost right away. See her headband in the 80's and her belly shirt in the 00's.
    • Superboy Conner Kent's leather-jacket, colorful outfit, piercings and surfer cut were meant to make him look cool and modern... in the 90's. He has updated his look a couple of times since then.
  • The Flash: Barry Allen was associated with a bowtie long after they were popular. With his return, Geoff Johns has Barry explaining that he had to borrow an old bowtie on the fly for a court appearance where he met his future love, Iris West, for the first time. She liked the look. He said nothing.
  • The Beehive Hairdo associated with Night Girl of the Legion of Substitute Heroes. She did switch to 'letting her hair down' for a few years in 1970s, and again for the long-term in the early 1980s to the very end of the original Legion continuity in 1994.
  • Johnny Thunder of the Justice Society of America sported a green business suit and bowtie that would have been in fashion when the character was created in the 1940s, but he kept wearing it for decades afterwards. The narration in one story in the 1980s lampshades this by mentioning that his fashion sense went into a permanent stall sometime in the 1950s.
  • Black Canary's outfit dates back to her debut as a 1940s noir-esque villain. It has been replaced but the comics always come back to the original. It's been given several explanations over time, with the most common being that the Legacy Character daughter of the original styled herself after her mother's old outfit. In the 2010s, DC explained her outfit as being because she's in a rock band.

Marvel Comics

  • Blade: Blade wore some really gaudy outfits back in the 70s, which tended to be red, or yellow coats with green pants. His modern look tends to be much more appreciated.
  • Daredevil: Typhoid Mary originally wore outfits based on New Wave Music. In the 2000s, this was replaced with leather.
  • Daughters of the Dragon: Misty Knight still wears a poofy 1970s-era afro (weirdly, though, it's far more exaggerated than her actual style in the '70s). Luke Cage, on the other hand, has managed to get his shirt buttoned all the way up.
  • S.H.I.E.L.D.: Dum Dum Dugan's trademark derby hat was already old-fashioned for his social class and nationality during World War II.
  • Spider-Man: The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) was especially bad for this. Seeing almost all the adult men wearing fedoras, teenage boys wearing bow ties, and girls wearing long skirts are especially jarring by today's standards.
    • Mary Jane Watson is a huge victim of this, being a fashion model during her appearances in the 1980s and 1990s. The funny thing was that the contemporary "big hair" look that Todd Mc Farlane gave her in the 1990s actually dated more quickly than her "so outdated it's cool again" 1960s hairstyle, which was then brought back.
    • Supporting character Captain Jean DeWolff dressed like someone out of a 1940s film noir and drove a matching vintage roadster, but that seems to have been a deliberately retro look.
  • X-Men:
    • Jubilee is the most extreme example that comes to mind. Although semi-possible as an outfit that a young girl would think is "cool" in the 1980s, the bright yellow trench coat and wrap-around sunglasses became just plain painful as the '90s continued. She did have a more modern costume during her time with the New Warriors.
    • Gambit's costume, with the wrap-around headpiece and leather jacket over actual body armor look, is now becoming a very dated 90s look. It doesn't help that almost all of the other X-Men have gotten a costume upgrade over the years except for him.
    • Dazzler; it doesn't help that she was created to cash in on the disco craze. And in 1980, when disco was running down. Dazzler wears her 1970s costume these days, though. Apparently, her singing career got a revival, so she's all glam again.

Disney Comics

  • Several examples: Donald Duck's sailor suit, Big Bad Wolf's one-suspender-trousers and Cat-in-the-hat-hat, Daisy's bow, and so on. Admittedly, both Donald and Scrooge's outfits were supposed to be outdated from the start. Attempts to modernize them (as in Quack Pack) have been made, with mixed results. At best. Part of this is caused by a schism of canon among the comic writers: some of them consider the stories to still be set in the 40s and 50s while others insist that they take place in the modern world.

Other Comic Books

  • Archie Comics:
    • Jughead's hat was actually in style for High School boys in the late Thirties/early 1940s. In The '90s Jughead got a backwards baseball cap. Fortunately the Powers That Be decided to change his hat back, given that he was named after it. The more modern-looking reboot keeps the hat, however the show Riverdale replaces it with a similar looking beanie.
    • Miss Grundy from the earlier strips had a dress with silhouettes akin to the mid-1920s. A strip from the 1970s even joked upon her hemline.
  • In The Beano, the artists occasionally tried to 'update' the characters' clothes. It usually didn't take (as with The Bash Street Kids and, to some extent, Dennis the Menace), but subtler changes did (as with Roger The Dodger getting long trousers).
  • Monica's Gang: Usually you can tell in which decade the character was introduced by looking at their outfits. The girls that were introduced from the 60's to the 70's wear dresses (except for Denise, who debuted in the 80's, but her default outfit is a puffy-sleeved dress with Mary Jane shoes), whereas the ones from the following decades wear tees and shorts; Likewise, the boys from older decades wore loafers and suspenders on their pants, whereas the ones from the younger decades have sneakers and cargo shorts. While the older characters can wear modern-style clothing for merchandising or if the plot calls for it in the comics, their default attire is always stuck in the 60's. This also applies to their parents.
  • Mortadelo y Filemón: According to Word of God, Mortadelo's clothing was already outdated when the comic was started in The '50s.
  • Spirou is perhaps the ultimate incarnation of this trope: When he started in 1938 he was a bell-boy elevator operator in a chic hotel wearing the traditional red outfit. The outfit (especially the hat) has become tied with the character, even as bell-boys in general and elevator operators in particular were consigned to history. Most readers ended up not knowing what the hell Spirou's uniform came from, but changing it became problematic because it was so intrinsically tied with the characters. Thus Spirou wore his outfit for many decades despite it being out of place. Newer authors compromised by making Spirou wear a variety of red clothes, and only keeping the uniform's hat to be used occasionally as a Continuity Nod. Many characters have even remarked on the odd hat's appearance or even outright questioned where it's from. Of course, it's lampshaded in Le Petit Spirou where every single member of Spirou's family wears the outfit 24/7. Recent takes on the series justify the clothes in different ways: in Emile Bravo's version for example, Spirou is a bell-boy operator but the reason he wears the outfit all the time is that he's too poor to buy new clothes. Meanwhile, Fantasio's fondness for bow-ties remains unexplained throughout the series.
  • Tintin:
    • Tintin's plus fours. Tintin himself was slowly updated (he wore jeans instead in his last adventure, Tintin and the Picaros). Herge once received numerous letters pointing out a minor inaccuracy he made in a depiction of a certain airplane, and wryly asked why he wasn't receiving similar mail over Tintin's pants being decades out of fashion.
    • While Captain Haddock's jacket, turtleneck and naval cap are pretty much timeless and Tintin's plus fours were something people actually wore at the time of his first appearances (less so after World War II, though), Professor Calculus' stiff high collar was outdated from the start. Like the beards sported by many of Hergé's scientists and savants, it harkens back to the time before World War I.
    • Additionally, the Thompsons have tried a few times to blend in when investigating in a foreign country, but their outfits were often too "folkloric", and on at least one occasion, the national dress of the wrong country. Far from blending in, they've been known to attract crowds come to laugh at them. Nowhere more hilarious than in The Blue Lotus, where they come wearing Qing Dynasty clothes, complete with queues and fans!note  The result?note 
      Thompson: [with nearly the entire town parading behind them laughing] Don't look now, but something tells me we're being followed...

    Comic Strips 
  • Blondie (1930): Dagwood Bumstead once commented to a man on a park bench about how many "weirdos" were walking around the city. That man couldn't help but notice that Dagwood wears a suit with one giant button on the front of it. It's a single shirt stud in a particularly stiff, formal shirt meant exclusively for white tie and tails. It's not meant to be worn with anything else, and is all but extinct even there, with most modern formal shirts taking two or three studs. (The high-waisted trousers and mandatory waistcoat worth with white tie mean that the four-stud shirts used with tuxedos don't really work.)
  • Most of the girls in Peanuts usually wear typically 1950s-style dresses. (Lucy and Sally eventually started sporting slacks, but kept their coiffed '50s hairdos.) A late strip makes reference to Harry Potter but the kids still dress like it's the 1950s, 1960s at the latest.
  • 9 Chickweed Lane - for a comic that's supposedly set in the present a lot of the characters dress in a style more suited to The '60s or The '70s (turtleneck shirts and dresses for the ladies, tweed coats with elbow patches for the men).
  • Beetle Bailey still wears the standard Army uniform that was used between the late 40s and early 70s.
  • Swedish military-humour character 91:an Karlsson still wears a blue uniform (outdated already when he was created in the 20s) despite most his comrades having switched to more modern camo.
  • While not as pronounced as others here, Garfield's owner Jon has hair, a collar shirt and shoes that firmly put his creation in the seventies. Given his Disco Dan tendencies and general social ineptitude, not to mention Vague Age, this actually suits his character quite well.
  • Very conspicuous in Andy Capp where every character's outfit (and the whole scenery surrounding them) is stuck in the late 50's- early 60's. This doesn't stop them from using smartphones in the more recent strips.

    Eastern European Animation 

    Fairy Tales 
  • In Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty, the prince notes that the Beauty's dress is (naturally) a century out of date, but of course he's too much of a gentleman to say it to a lady's face.

    Films — Animated 
  • Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase:
    • The gang's clothing was updated (and carried over to What's New, Scooby-Doo?). It had a hilarious comparison between present updated Daphne and her old-style Video Game counterpart:
      Daphne: Did I really wear that years ago?
      VG Daphne: That jacket, with that skirt?
      Both: Hmmm...
    • Fred and his counterpart, on the other hand happily reminisce on the relevance of the ascot.
      Fred: Nice ascot!
      VG Fred: Works for me!
  • Mother Gothel from Tangled has a wardrobe centuries out of date, which serves as an indicator that she's far older than she appears to be.
  • Ken from Toy Story 3 is very into fashion and pretty much all of his clothes date from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, suggesting he might be an older model. Comes back to bite him in the ass when Barbie starts tearing them apart as part of her interrogation.
    Barbie: Ooh, a Nehru jacket!
    Ken: Barbie, not the Nehru!
    Barbie: This is from, what, 1967?
    Ken: The "Groovy Formal" collection, yes!
  • When Marnie Was There seems to take place in the 2010s but the titular Marnie dresses in very vintage looking clothes for a 12 year old. Even her colours of choice are somewhat dated. Her parents and their peers also dress in clothes that look more like they're fit for the early-to-mid 20th century. This is because Marnie is a ghost and is fashioned after her childhood in the mid-1900s.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Plot-relevant in Good Bye, Lenin!. As stated below under Real Life, this happened in the Communist bloc. The entire movie is about tricking protagonist Alex's mom into thinking Communist Germany still exists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus, everyone who is going to visit Alex's mom is required to take off their Capitalist Germany clothes and put on their Communist Germany clothes.
  • Steve Rogers in The Avengers (2012). His fashion is hopelessly out of date (long-sleeve collared shirts, maybe with the sleeves rolled up and slacks) which makes him look stuffy and formal compared to Tony or Clint. Entirely justified, given that Cap spent the last 70 years as a Capsicle. Cap himself suggests that his old stripes and stars uniform is a bit old-fashioned. Coulson suggests instead that with everything that has happened, people "might need a little old-fashioned." This noticeably changes as of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and beyond where Steve adopts a more modern haircut and wardrobe to symbolize him becoming more acclimated to the present day.
  • In I'm Gonna Git You Sucka former pimp Flyguy was sent to prison in The '70s and when he gets out a decade later he wears the same outrageous pimp outfit he wore before his arrest: yellow suit with wide leopard print fur trimmed bell bottoms, a wide brimmed hat and clear platform shoes filled with water and goldfish. Instead of looks of admiration as he expects people they point and laugh, making fun of him. At the end of the movie he changes into a cooler (for The '80s) outfit: a slick, silk grey suit and fedora.
  • Back to the Future:
    • Back to the Future Part II: In the alternate 1985, where Biff is a Corrupt Corporate Executive, Biff and his gang (still together since 1955) seem to fit in more with The '70s than The '80s. Part of this is because Biff's look and lifestyle are based on Elvis Presley's final days. Biff's outfit and hairstyle in the original 1985 in the beginning of the first movie also seem more at home in the 1970s.
    • In Back to the Future Part III, when Marty travels to 1885, Doc Brown from 1955 dresses Marty in what he believes to be appropriate period themed garb. Marty protests the loudly colored faux cowboy clothing, saying "Clint Eastwood never wore anything like this". When Marty gets to the past and goes into town, he's quickly mocked for his clothing and nearly gets killed by the bad guys. When 1885 Doc Brown saves him, he asks "What idiot dressed you in that outfit?" Marty says "You did.".
  • In-universe this occurs in the film The Toll of the Sea. Lotus Flower is a young woman living in China during the early 1920s. When she presumes her American husband will take her home with him, she tries to dress her most fashionable in Western clothes. Alas, she uses her grandmother's old fashion book for advice. She looks gorgeous, but still painfully out-of-date by several decades.
  • Ghosts in The Frighteners seem to be stuck wearing whatever outfits they died in. This means that Stuart is wearing a letterman jacket from the 1950s, and Cyrus is trapped dressed like Disco Stu, which he is unhappy about. Averted after they cross over to heaven, at which point they get some nicer white duds.
    Cyrus: You get to dress nice. Here I am still looking like Linc from The Mod Squad.
    Frank: You died in the 70's. It's a bummer.
  • This becomes a plot point in Somewhere in Time. Richard procures what he thinks is a period-appropriate suit when traveling back in time only to arrive and find out that it's ten years out of date. Then, when he tries showing off how practical his suit is, he accidentally discovers a modern penny, which snaps him back to the modern day.
  • Invoked in Nurse Betty. The title character believes she's a nurse on her favorite soap opera hospital, and the most surefire sign that she's out of place is the fact that she's wearing the little white nurse dress and cap while surrounded by actual nurses wearing modern blue scrubs.
  • In Thoroughly Modern Millie set in 1922, flapper Millie tries to get her new friend Dorothy to change her old-fashioned long dresses for short skirts and bob her equally olf-fashioned long hair.
  • In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, despite living in the mid-twentieth century, the humorless and villainous Judge Doom wears a suit years out of date, complete with a black hat, overcoat, gloves, and sword.

    Literature 
  • The James Bond of the novels has a pretty good sense of timeless style, except for the nylon underpants.
  • The main character from Hard to Be a God (written in 1963) wears nylon underwear. In the 22nd century.
  • The Wizarding World in Harry Potter tends to be between a couple of decades and a couple of centuries out of touch with Muggle fashions, alongside regularly being clueless about the gender-appropriateness of muggle clothes, leading to an Anachronism Stew hodgepodge of clothing depending on the age of the wizard and how much stock they put in holding themselves apart from mere Muggles. Wizard fashions change with the times as well, as illustrated in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Ron comments on his Yule Ball robes, "Traditional? They're ancient!"
  • This trope is a major turning point for the protagonist of The Bride of Beverly Hills. Priya lucks into a job at a fashion magazine and very much wants to dress the part of a modern working woman, but this puts her at odds with her mother-in-law, who expects her to dress in tradition Indian garb. In the end, her mother-in-law compromises by letting her wear ‘fashionable’ clothes from the height of the disco era, which naturally makes her a complete laughingstock.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The notion of this became a running gag on Arrested Development, with the character of Lupe who was known to wear exclusively hand-me-downs from Lucille. This usually resulted in funny background gags, such as a Halloween jumper on Thanksgiving or a Bush/Cheney jumper in late 2005.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Certain vampires are identified by their old-style clothes. (One of the more hilarious examples was in "Faith, Hope and Trick", where Faith is first seen dancing with a disco vampire.) Joss Whedon originally intended all vampires to wear clothing matching the time period in which they died, but realized that the concept was major Nightmare Retardant. The first episode had a passing reference to the idea, with Buffy identifying a vampire based on his 1980s fashion.
    • Spike has been using the same leather jacket since he looted it off of Nikki Wood in 1977, and has had the same bleached hair since at least before Billy Idol, seeing as it's been mentioned in canon that Billy stole his hair from Spike.
  • John Steed in The Avengers (1960s) wears a bowler hat and old-fashioned suits, to match his classic cars and generally old-fashiond style. His partner, Mrs. Peel, by contrast wore very up-to-date (for the time) Mod fashions and drove an also modern for-the-time Lotus Elan.
  • Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood fought in World War II, and has worn his military greatcoat ever since. On occasion, this has caused other characters (who are unaware that he is immortal) to speculate that dressing in period military means he's gay. (Of course, he's not that picky.)
  • Doctor Who: The Doctor. This is forgivable, though, since if their outfit isn't fashionable in one episode (or era), it may be in style in the next one.
    • The original design of the First Doctor's costume was intended to deliberately invoke this trope, as the combination of out-of-fashion clothes and mixed eras effectively gave the impression of an alien traveler from another time who would have only a broad idea of mid-twentieth-century fashion. (This can be viewed as counterpoint to other sci-fi time travelers who turn up dressed spot-on for the moment of broadcast, such as Gary Seven in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Assignment: Earth".)
  • Good Omens (2019):
  • Mad Men covers the entire span of The '60s but that doesn't mean that every character gets a new wardrobe according to every years' new trends. The older characters wear the same outfits from The '50s or The '40s like the three-piece suits of Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper, or the early 20th century shirt with cameo brooch wore by Jurassic secretary Ida Blankenship. Even the gorgeous Joan Harris sticks for most of the show to her Marilynesque wardrobe when it's becoming outdated in the late 1960s (she does eventually upgrade her style in the last seasons).
  • Tony Blundetto of The Sopranos went to prison in The '80s. It shows.
  • In The New Mike Hammer Stacy Keach wore the fedora and trenchcoat associated with the typical 1940/50's Private Detective, despite the fact that the series was set in The '80s.
  • Parodied in Flight of the Conchords. Jemaine and Bret have updated their look, with gelled hair and 80's synthpop-like clothing, which leads to this exchange;
    Dave: You guys seem a lot cooler today. Usually you guys wear clothes from the 70's.
    Jemaine: They're not from the 70's, they're from New Zealand.
    Dave: Isn't that the same thing?
  • Captain Peacock of Are You Being Served? is always seen wearing semi-formal morning dress, which had long been abandoned by all but the staunchest businessmen, even in The '70s. This goes hand in hand with the character, who is fastidious, pompous and stuffy.
  • At one point in The Red Green Show, during a discussion of Dalton's driver's license (expired in 1994), Mike comments that his wardrobe suggests 1962.
  • This is actually done for people who know their fashion history in Downton Abbey, where Grande Dame Violet, the Dowager Countess, wears outfits from the 1900s in the 1910s and 20s, while her granddaughters and daughter-in-law (and her sister-in-law, a forward-thinking American) wear the height of fashion.
  • In Star Trek: Voyager, the crew of Voyager are lost in the Delta Quadrant before the rest of Starfleet changed their uniforms, leading them to continue wearing the old-style uniforms, even after re-establishing contact with Earth.
  • The Wire: After spending the last 14 years in prison, Cutty shows up to an interview in a double-breasted sports coat, obviously having not updated his wardrobe since he got out.
  • In the second season of Stranger Things, students of Hawkins Middle School and Hawkins High School in 1984 wear plaid, long skirts and fashion that came out of The '60s. In "MADMAX", the scenes went from two girls walking with short-sleeved vests and long plaid skirts to a girl wearing a turtleneck and a plaid skirt. There is also a girl with '80s Hair and a plaid, long skirt walking down in a hallway full of students.
  • Leave It to Beaver: Season 1's "Beaver's Short Pants" has Beaver and Wally looked after by June's elderly Aunt Martha while she's out of town. Aunt Martha is unimpressed by the boys' blue jeans and t-shirts, but gives up on Wally since he's a teenager and fitting in is important. But she takes 8-year-old Beaver out shopping for clothes she feels are more appropriate for a boy his age: a Buster Brown suit, about 40 years out of fashion at the time, complete with Boyish Shorts that get him teased at school.

    Music 
  • Lampooned in the rap song "Parents Just Don't Understand" by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince ... the main protagonist claims his new clothes (which his mother bought for him) are hopelessly outdated and uncool, referring to 1963 and The Brady Bunch as examples of what influenced the styles he'll be made to wear ... this in contrast to the (unstated) hip-hop styles he wants to wear to school.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Ric Flair became so associated with his long sequined robes that he continued using them in his entrances decades after they went out of fashion.
  • ECW's Tommy Dreamer drew an enormous amount of hate in his early days due to being a prettyboy face (good guy) and his comically outdated wrestling outfit, complete with bright green suspenders.

    Video Games 
  • Long-Runners are especially susceptible to this trope, even more so if the outfit ends up becoming a vital part of the character. See Chun-Li's blue qipao and Terry Bogard's ponytail and trucker hat.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Tommy Vercetti spent fifteen years in prison, and the shirt he wears went out of fashion. Other characters in the game make puns on this.
  • Fallout: "Pre-war" outfits are clearly 50s fashion despite that the war happened in the late 21st century. This is a major clue (among many others) that the game takes place in an alternate universe — the game is stuck in the 50s, mostly to afford the zeerust.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney takes place 20 Minutes into the Future and Miles is wearing a ruffled cravat as if it was the Victorian era, although this seems to be something common to the Von Karma family he's from, and Phoenix has made snide comments to himself about his ruffles.
  • Shantae has a variation with Rottytops; she wears a sweat band, tank top and daisy duke combo in what is an Arabian-inspired setting, never mind the first game coming out in 2002note , yet Rottytops' wardrobe has stuck with the series since then, even after other characters got design changes.
  • Invoked in Mortal Kombat 11. When several of the original Kombatants are plucked from the 90's in the time travel plot, most of the characters are wearing what they wore in the older games...except Johnny Cage, who is dressed in hideous 90's day-glo and not the subdued karate pants with no shirt that he actually wore in every Mortal Kombat up until MKX. This could be due to Johnny's personality having been massively flanderized since MK9.
  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: In a guest appearance in a crossover storyline, Kassandra is dressed in a Roman legionnaire's uniform... while on 9th century Skye. It helps show that Kass hasn't gotten much socializing done lately, because her modern day appearance had her in a suit.

    Webcomics 
  • El Goonish Shive's Elliot, Tedd and especially Justin have very 1990s/early 2000s hairstyles. They've been toned down as part of the Art Evolution, and Tedd eventually got an Important Haircut that changed it to a less dated style, but Elliot and Justin's haven't gone away completely.
  • In Fans!, Rumy's family is so old-fashioned that they may as well live in the 19th century. Her sister in particular could give Mr. Burns a run for his money as far as an inability to comprehend what people are into these days, and she's never seen out of a kimono.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Scooby-Doo.:
    • Freddy's orange ascot.
    • Pretty much everyone's outfit really! Daphne and Velma look incredibly dated when not wearing more modern duds. The only one that could be said to have avoided it is Shaggy, and he's only avoided it out of luck — pants and a t-shirt just refuse to go out of style. Although Shaggy's pants were originally (that is, in the 1969 series) drawn bell-bottomed, so not even he is entirely safe. In the 1980s stories with Scrappy, the bell-bottomed ends were gone, inexplicably gaining a red shirt in the process, though later they were changed to brown again.
    • It's lampshaded in a commercial for What's New, Scooby-Doo?, in which the gang finds Fred's lucky ascot. As the gang tries to figure out what it is, Fred has a flashback to the time he wore it last and got made fun of by a girl at a party. Velma then deduces it may have been worn around the neck, at which point Fred dejectedly says he's going to wait in the van. The ad had this tagline:
    Same dog. New Tricks. No Ascot.
  • Schoolhouse Rock! has a lot of those characters fall victim to this. The superhero Verb in his mirrored shades and shirt open to his belt really stands out. Not to mention all of those bell-bottoms!
  • Lampshaded in The Venture Brothers: The titular brothers (and even their father) dress in a mostly 60s pulp fashion. Same goes for Dr Orpheus (who dresses like Dracula, for lack of a better term). All of them have had their outdated duds remarked upon by people who avoid the trope. Dean and Hank have both remarked that their fathers forces them to wear those painfully out of date clothes. They'd much rather wear something more...normal.
  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Northern Water Tribe plans to infiltrate the Fire Nation Navy and assasinate Admiral Zhao. They use actual Fire Navy uniforms for the infiltration, but since they were captured 85 years ago during the early part of the war they are blatantly out of date when compared to the modern uniforms. Sokka, who traveled from the Southern Water Tribe and encountered many Fire Nation soldiers along the way, has to explain the differences in styles. The 'old' uniforms are based on the designs from the original unaired pilot episode.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Disco Stu and his leisure suit.
    • Otto in later seasons. He dresses and talks like a perpetual 1980s teenager. He even still wears a portable cassette player on his hip despite the fact that they've been obsolete for years.
    • The Simpsons had intentionally outdated designs even by 1980s standards but it becomes more blatant as the seasons go by.
  • Popeye:
    • Popeye gets a pass when wearing his Navy whites (which haven't changed much in decades) but usually he's wearing a much more dated nautical outfit that was old-fashioned even in the 1930's.
    • Olive Oyl's fashion statements hasn't changed since the 1920s with her psyche knot note  and galoshes.
  • Parodied in Futurama, in the episode "Less Than Hero", where Fry and Leela gain superpowers and, together with Bender (who already has them), decide to become superheroes; as Captain Yesterday, Fry wears a decidedly outfashioned white-and-blue disco outfit.
  • In Milo Murphy's Law, time-travelers Cavendish and Dakota decided that since every time period they went to was the past, they'd go with a Seventies-style of dress. Dakota went with the 1970's, while Cavendish went with the 1870's.
  • A downplayed example, but Ralphie still wears his red baseball cap in The Magic School Bus Rides Again. Kids still casually wear caps however it's largely seen as a nineties (or rural) fashion.
  • In The Owl House, as Belos/Philip prepares to return back to the human realm, he changes into his normal human clothes... That is, normal clothes for a guy from the late 17th century. Luz lampshades this.
    Luz: Not to mention, a fashion sense like that...? Yikes, my dude.

    Real Life 
  • Portuguese fashion was decades behind other countries in the 17th century, which was embarrassingly shown when a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, sailed to England to marry Charles II.
  • Likewise the Communist bloc during the Cold War; this was much commented on in media coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  • In 16th century England, portraits and funeral images show that the fashions of the country nobility were at least 20 years behind those of the royal court in London.
  • Jeff Foxworthy once did a routine on how men in general (and his father in particular) tend to tune out fashion at a certain point after marriage and parenthood and simply keep wearing old stuff; the usual timing of fashion cycles and human development mean that dads' clothes are the most horribly dated when the kids are in early adolescence.
  • Jerry Seinfeld also did a bit, saying you could tell what a man's favorite year was, since that's the fashion style he'll wear for the rest of his life.
  • "Throwback uniforms" began appearing among US sports teams when baseball's Chicago White Sox brought back the 1917 design for one game during the original Comiskey Park's last season in 1990. The trend quickly spread to other teams and leagues.
    • In 1994 the National Football League brought back old designs for all its teams to celebrate the league's 75th anniversary, and they've appeared on and off ever since. Some were attractive enough that they were retained on a semi-permanent basis. Some...not so much.
    • Similarly in England Arsenal used a kit design based on their original colours during their final season at Highbury stadium.
    • The Los Angeles Lakers tried to play a game with the uniforms from The '80s. They changed back to their normal uniforms at half time. Short shorts on gigantic men do not work well together.
    • The Canadian Football League also got in on this. Caused some amusement with the way some team colours have changed over the years.
    • For some reason the Tampa Bay Buccaneers trotted out throwback unis based on their infamous orange-and-white "creamsicle" look in 2010. Nostalgia Filter?
    • The Utah Jazz did a few throwback games in their original uniforms in the 2009-10 season, which proved popular enough that they permanently restored the original logo to their uniforms the next season.
    • Many National League baseball teams reverted to the old-fashioned "pillbox" hats in 1976 for the league's 100th anniversary. The Pittsburgh Pirates kept them for ten more years, the only team to do so. The hats were so far out of fashion that they were arguably cooler than the ubiquitous modern-style caps.
  • According to The Big Book of the Unexplained "real-life" Men in Black were known to wear clothes that were either "wildly out-of-date or not yet in style" to go with their vintage yet seemingly brand-new cars "(black, of course)".
  • Nurse wearing white uniform with cap. In the United States, this started to be phased out in the 1980s, with specialty units (OR, ICU, Maternal-Child) having color-coded scrubs to make them easily recognizable. Other units started following suit. Now, all nurses wear scrubs, in the hospital and other care settings. However, most nursing schools still have "capping ceremonies" before graduation, because every school has its own unique style of cap.
    • The Guinness Book of World Records didn't get the memo about this, a fact that came to light when a British emergency room nurse ran the London Marathon in her uniform to raise money for charity and beat the previous world record time, only to discover that they had apparently not updated their official definition of a nurse's uniform since the 1920s.
  • Sometimes, clothes that were merely the norm on the street in one age become some profession's uniform.
    • The habits worn by many orders of nuns — basically the clothes of a respectable Renaissance-era widow.
    • The 18th-century wigs and gowns worn by British judges and barristers, versions of which are standard across the Commonwealth of Nations and other English-speaking countries. The gowns are black because the judiciary went into mourning upon the death of Queen Mary II — in 1694.
    • Every so often in Singapore, you'll spot older SAF reservists wearing the older-style camo pattern uniforms rather than the more recent digital camo patterns, usually because their old uniforms were in such good condition that they didn't draw new uniforms from the unit stores.
  • Many military customs and courtesies are based around the wearing of hats (generally called "covers", at least in the US), and their wear is required outdoors with almost all uniforms, long after wearing hats was considered mandatory in civilian society. US Navy regulations, for example, mandate that that covers must be worn at all times outdoors, except when unsafe to do so such as on a flight line, that salutes are only rendered or returned while covered, and that they should not be worn indoors, unless the wearer is "under arms" (armed in the conduct of their duties). None of this sort of hat etiquette really exists in contemporary society.
  • President James Monroe earned the nickname "the last cocked hat" as he was still wearing a tricorne hat (the kind worn during the Revolutionary War) that had fallen out of style by the 1790's and was replaced by the bicorne hat (also known as the Napoleon hat), and by the end of his term, the top hat had largely replaced the bicorne (at least in civilian wear), making his fashion two generations out of date. Monroe also continued to wear knee breeches in the style of the 18th century, with a famous 1823 portrait showing him surrounded by his Cabinet, all of whom are wearing trousers (and, given that men's fashion didn't change much in the 19th century, makes him look as much as a century out of date).

 
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War on Lone Moose

The town of Lone Moose and Whippleton have a treaty where it mentions if Lone Moose builds something on Whippleton's territory (in this case, Vera purposely moving her fence five feet over their border), they have the right to declare war on the town.

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Main / SillyReasonForWar

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