By Dr. Karen for Boomeryearbook.com

It’s no big secret that fashion recycles its old trends. Ask any fashion slave, and she’ll be happy to confirm that the styles are cyclical. Currently, this fashion practice seems to be taking place more than ever. Recent fashion is taking its clothing cues from numerous 20^th century styles, running the gamut from the 1950s through the 1980s.

What does this mean for us Baby Boomers?

Whether you once wished you were old enough to be a Beatnik or a teenybopper, or as a teenager turned into a hippie or a Mod, you’ll easily spot some of the fashion elements from your formative years in today’s trends.

Still have a pair of cigarette pants stashed away? Go find them, because they are today’s skinny jeans. Same goes for 1960s-era pyramid coats, A-line shift dresses, and pea coats.

If tracksuits, tweeds or fringed boots from the 1970s were more your style, you’re in luck. Those are back in, too. You might also want to look through your closet for 1970s granny skirts, peasant blouses, and anything resembling the hippie look. It’s all the rage again, only now it’s called bohemian style.

Feel silly wearing this look? Give it to your trendy daughter in college, she’ll know what to do with it.

All of this fashion “borrowing” from past trends may seem to cast current style makers in a lazy light, but it has been common practice for ages. The hippie and Mod looks of the 1960s borrowed elements from the 1920s flapper style. The 1980s “big shoulders” look was a throwback to the 1940s.

Yes, the term for hip huggers is now low-rise jeans and Mohawks became faux-hawks, but everyone knows they come from our generation. Remember what your mother said? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Baby Boomers, consider yourselves complimented.

Have something to add to this story? Continue your trip down memory lane at Boomer Yearbook.

Will I joke around and still dig those sounds

When I grow up to be a man?

- Beach Boys, “When I Grow Up” (1964)

Say what you will about the Baby Boomer generation, but one thing is for certain: our formative years were accompanied by an awesome real-time soundtrack. True, many of us were born too late to see the dawn of Rock and Roll or Elvis in his prime. That is a small price to pay, however, for being just the right age to appreciate the new Motown Sound of the 1960s or to catch the wave of the surf rock craze that the Beach Boys rode in on.

Even if you weren’t a fan of “Surfin’ USA” or Diana Ross and the Supremes, you could still count yourself lucky for being on the front lines during American music’s British Invasion. In February 1964, a quartet of chaps known as the Beatles made their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show and ushered in Beatlemania. Less than two months later, this boy band from across the pond was dominating the Billboard charts, and all of the nation’s Top Five hits were Beatles tunes. The band would produce many more hits until its breakup in 1970; their top-selling 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album would be released just in time to welcome the “psychedelic era” of pop culture, along with the albums of fellow Britons and bad-boy counterparts the Rolling Stones, who would return to their hard rock roots by 1968 with their single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

Whatever your musical tastes were at the time, you could find a plethora of excellent music being performed by an unusually large pool of talented musicians. This was true even if you were barely out of diapers. Remember “The Chipmunk Song”? It won a 1958 Best Recording for Children Grammy, and in 1960 the award went to the follow-up album “Let’s All Sing With the Chipmunks.” Any way you slice it, our childhoods came with a great soundtrack.

Care to chime in? Share your coming-of-age musical memories with others at Boomer Yearbook.