Eddie Bauer is reintroducing jackets that the company supplied to World War II pilots and 1950s mountaineers. Jantzen’s ruffled halter bikini is modeled on a pin-up-girl style it sold in the 1940s. Sperry Top-Siders is selling white buck shoes based on archival pieces. And L. L. Bean has revised a hunting shoe that a 1914 catalog sold with the warning “You cannot expect success hunting big game if your feet are not properly dressed.”  Brands are combing their archives in the hope that old clothing styles with a classic feel will assuage consumer anxiety in shaky times. With some Americans feeling as if they can’t trust government, Wall Street or big business, the brands are betting their heritage lines will evoke memories of better times — and help pry open shoppers’ wallets.  “We’ve been through a very unsettling time, and it’s when people are discontent with the present that they really start appreciating or having a nostalgia for the past,” said Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst for the market research firm Millward Brown. “Marketers are seeking to tap into that.”  The public has little confidence in most American institutions, particularly Congress and big business, according to Gallup polls taken over the last several years. And consumers are not spending: after months of sales growth, for example, the Census Bureau reported on Friday that May retail sales declined 1.2 percent, much further than analysts expected and the first decline since the fall.  That environment has made items that might draw consumer interest all the more important to the bottom line. Though the companies do not break out sales of heritage products, most say the lines are selling well above projections. And prices tend to be higher than the standard products — L. L. Bean, for instance, charges about 25 percent more for its “Signature” pieces.  “There’s something major going on right now in the American consumer market and mind-set which is leading people to embrace heritage brands,” said Neil S. Fiske, chief executive of Eddie Bauer, which introduced heritage items last fall. “People want to believe in things that are American and want to be part of things that have longevity.”  Reviving yesterday’s long-forgotten products can be both fun and daunting. While it has been tried here and there in the past, it hasn’t been done to this degree, the brands say.  At L. L. Bean, a clothing maker for almost 100 years, the task has fallen to Alex Carleton, the creative director for L. L. Bean’s “Signature” collection. Housed behind Mr. Bean’s old Victorian house off of Main Street in Freeport, Me., the company’s archives include rooms full of clothes, lockers stuffed with boots, every catalog ever printed, letters from people like Babe Ruth, and Mr. Bean’s hunting journals.  Clothes are hung or folded, encased in polypropylene containers, and have little tags explaining their provenance. The archivist insists that visitors put on white cotton gloves when they touch anything, and Mr. Carleton complies.  Some clothes he found were inspirational.  He redesigned a women’s wrap skirt, promoted in the spring 1957 catalog as “suitable for sport and camping wear,” as a casual chambray wrap skirt, with a slimmer fit and shorter length. For a restyling of a 1940s hunting jacket, he removed the plastic lining of the “kill pocket” in the back of the coat, originally meant to hold freshly shot bloody ducks.  Other pieces, Mr. Carleton said, did not make the cut.  He uncovered especially odd items from the 1970s, an era he plans to draw from for the fall 2011 collection. Some of those oddities: an angora colic band that wrapped around the torso was meant to warm the lower back and a men’s Labrador parka that is “a pull-over-the-head piece that practically goes down to your knees,” he said. There is also a women’s Tundra sweater made of thick white wool with a tiny hood and odd black-and-yellow trim at the cuffs, and a face mask made of deer skin that “completely covers the face, including nose, chin, ears and throat.”  “We want to make sure we’re not producing garments that are going to make people walking around look like they just stepped out of an ice storm,” he said.  Mr. Fiske, of Eddie Bauer, also turned to an archivist to assemble old items for inspiration. The company recently introduced clothes like the B-9 parka, which Mr. Bauer supplied to the Army Air Forces during World War II, and the Skyliner jacket, a quilted coat that Mr. Bauer designed after a freezing winter fishing expedition.  At the swimwear company Jantzen, which introduced a heritage collection this spring, more updating was necessary. Take a maillot bathing suit, inspired by a swimsuit from the Twenties. Now, the bathing suit is a red one-piece number with a crystal band and a hint of a skirt. Then, it was knit from wool, weighed more than eight pounds when wet, and was meant for both women and men, said Lorraine Medici, vice president of marketing at Jantzen.  Other brands glancing backward include Halston, which reworked designs from the Seventies to create its heritage line. Sperry Top-Siders is selling limited-edition shoes with old-school styling, like brick-colored soles. Keds is issuing two shoe designs for each decade from the last century (a 1920s sneaker looks almost like a dress shoe, with black and white details).  The trend extends to other industries, too. Earlier this year, General Mills sold some Lucky Charms and Cheerios in limited-edition vintage boxes. Pepsi-Cola brought back limited-edition Pepsi and Mountain Dew with retro labels late last year. And Carl’s Jr. brought back a vintage menu item — chili dogs, which Carl Karcher sold from a cart in the 1940s — last year.  The popularity of nostalgic items is not entirely because of the bad economy, said Lands’ End’s president, Nick Coe, who said he expected that the company’s historically inspired Canvas line would sell well even if the economy improved. And it is not always about good memories, either; the economy for much of the Seventies, for example, was a disaster.  “Buying habits have pretty seriously changed from the crazy consumption of the previous decade,” Mr. Coe said. “It’s not necessarily about cheap — it’s about real value.”  “The days of frivolous spending or buying stuff that’s disposable have gone away,” he said.
Clothing brands are betting hard-pressed consumers will prefer the comfort of goods from the past, when times werenât so tough.