NEW YORK - Is that an echo I hear when somebody says the ‘80s are back?

Six months ago, the catwalks of New York, Paris and Milan presaged a return to an era that some of us remember with little fondness and many are too young to remember at all. Design houses as disparate as Gucci, Givenchy, Ungaro, Gianfranco Ferre, Gareth Pugh, Proenza Schouler and Marc Jacobs, for his own label and for Louis Vuitton, started swiping references to that benighted era with displays of big shoulders, saturated neon colors, wedge hairdos, pouf skirts, shredded fishnets, oversize jackets and metal mesh.

Now that the stuff is rolling into stores, consumers are in for a flashback - at least they are if they have any firsthand recollection of Adam Ant or Culture Club or “Working Girl” or, for that matter, the Reagan White House.

“Anyone who has been in the fashion business for longer than five years,” Amy M. Spindler, the late Times fashion critic, once wrote, “might be feeling like a drowning man whose life is flashing before his eyes.” Ms. Spindler was referring to the disturbingly rapid-fire way fashion had of recycling the recent past.

That was in long-ago 1996, when fashion archaeology was still necessarily conducted in musty used-clothes stores. Now the pace of appropriation has accelerated.

“People embrace things so quickly,” said Laura Wills, who, as proprietor of the vintage clothing store Screaming Mimi’s in downtown New York, has spent three decades anticipating which style memory will be next up on the cultural screen. “They move on so fast that they constantly need new references. Around the store we laugh and say, ‘Didn’t we already do the ‘80s? Didn’t we have that neon moment five years ago?’”

The truth is, we have. We had the return of “Flashdance,” that seminal artifact of schlock filmmaking and stretch leggings, as long ago as the mid-’90s, when the designers Roger Padilha and Jennifer Groves showed a fashion collection that paid loving homage to Jennifer Beals’s leg warmers, suede fringe and shoulder-slouched shirts. We had the lace-gloves-andcrucifix Madonna of “Like a Virgin” in all kinds of iterations and from designers like Betsey Johnson and Jean Paul Gaultier. We had the dropped-crotch trousers inevitably associated with MC Hammer, interpreted early on by Rick Owens and later by that designer’s many imitators.

“A lot of those trends have been creeping in for a while, the leggings and the big shoulders and the neon,” said Chioma Nnadi, the style editor of Fader magazine. “It’s about escapism for people.” And not incidentally about the humor to be derived in tough times from flouting the strictures of safe, approved taste. “A certain amount of what is being revived is quite cheesy,” Ms. Nnadi added. “But then sometimes bad taste allows more room for creativity and play.”

The latest rendering of the ‘80s may not be altogether recognizable as such. Where, one might ask, is the ‘80s of neo-Beat-style scenesters like the filmmaker Eric Mitchell or of musicians like Arto Lindsay and Lydia Lunch? Where is the plaid-shirted prole-chic of activists from groups like Act Up and Queer Nation? Where are the miniskirts and tattered fishnets of the gorilla-masked feminist radicals who called themselves the Guerrilla Girls?

“People were a lot more controversial and out there” in the ‘80s, the designer Keanan Duffty said. “I remember going into the Foundry,” he said, referring to a legendary London shop where Boy George was a clerk, “and George was wearing a Star of David Tshirt, Rasta-like dreadlocks, a Hasidic hat, heavy makeup and a skirt.”

What is missing from the current revival, Mr. Duffty said, is “that striving for outsider status, that sense of ‘I don’t care.’”