LENS


It’s a new year, a time when we pledge to break old habits and start fresh: a change in our spending and saving, a change in our closets, a change in our diets, perhaps, and a change in the White House. Change. Yes, we can! Er... no we can’t?

From music to fashion, it seems what’s old is new again, and just as we are moving forward into a new year, the past is making a comeback.

This time, it comes in vinyl. The novelty and retro allure of the vinyl record has suddenly made it chic again. The LP has seen an unlikely spike in sales, long after the music industry said the format was obsolete, wrote The Times’s Alex Williams. Shipments of LPs and EPs jumped from over 900,000 in 2006 to nearly 1.3 million records in 2007 in the United States. And the surge of interest has prompted music labels to expand their vinyl offerings for the first time in nearly two decades, with bands like Radiohead and Metallica becoming available to newgeneration fans of vinyl.

“The process of taking the record off the shelf, pulling it out of the sleeve, putting the needle on the record, makes for a much more intense and personal connection with the music because it’s more effort,”R.J.Crowder-Schaefer, 21, a senior at New York University, told Mr.Williams.

Burning coal for warmth also demands more time and effort, but some American homeowners are turning back the clock. Coal, a dominant source of heat for homes for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is cheap and plentiful. And in a time of financial anxiety and price spikes in the cost of heating oil and natural gas, it is making a comeback as a home heating fuel, wrote The Times’s Tom Zeller Jr. and Stefan Milkowski.

Online coal forums are buzzing and manufacturers of coal stoves are getting inundated with orders, The Times reported. Near Pennsylvania mines, heating with a high grade of coal can be three times less expensive than heating with oil and four times less expensive than natural gas.

“It takes a little bit of time,”said Wesley Ridlington, who uses an outdoor coal furnace as his main source for heat and hot water in Alaska.“But for the savings, it’s worth it.”

To the Times’ Eric Wilson, some old trends are not worth it. If fashion is supposed to embrace change, Mr.Wilson says, it’s been surprisingly stubborn. Trends like skinny jeans, white plastic sunglasses and fur-tipped boots that should have died at least a year ago do not appear to be going anywhere, he wrote.

That sense of sameness was also on the runways, he said. The models in 2008 were stars of the 1990s, like Linda Evangelista in the Prada campaign and Naomi Campbell for Yves Saint Laurent.

But what’s retro on the runway is new again in Poland, where shopping for vintage clothing and bargain-hunting at thrift stores have lost their stigma and are now trendy in a country adjusting to its newfound wealth.

At Tomitex in Warsaw, a second-hand clothes store where hipsters mix with retirees, clothing sells for roughly $15 a kilogram to as low as $1.65, wrote The Times’s Nicholas Kulish.

“Young Poles are now confident enough in their ability to buy new clothes that they at last have taken to wearing old ones,”wrote Mr.Kulish.

Ania Kuczynska, 33, a fashion designer in Warsaw, told Mr.Kulish that“a willingness to embrace used clothes signals a new maturity in a city finding its way in fashion.”

“It’s just the next step in our reality, in our growing economy,”she said.“The times are changing.”Or are they?