Modern Retro: AI-Generated 70s Retail Stores for 96 Brands
What if Tesla, Supreme, or Spotify had existed in the 1970s? An AI visual experiment that reimagines modern brands as vintage retail stores -- and turned into a print business.
The Problem
AI image generation opened a creative door that did not exist before. Suddenly, anyone with a good idea could visualise concepts that would previously require a photographer, a set designer, and a production budget. But most AI art was (and still is) generic, directionless, or purely decorative.
The question that sparked Modern Retro was deceptively simple: What if modern brands had existed in the 1970s? Not as a logo exercise or a flat design challenge, but as fully realised retail environments -- shopfronts with signage, window displays, the patina of an era. What would a Tesla dealership look like next to a Ford showroom in 1975? What about a Supreme store on a high street in 1972?
The Approach
Every image is generated using fal.ai's Flux model, with custom prompts carefully crafted for each brand. The prompt engineering was the real creative work -- each brand required a different approach based on its category, visual identity, and what would be most compelling (or absurd) about placing it in the 1970s.
A five-factor scoring system rates each brand on its absurdity -- how anachronistic it would be to see this brand in the 1970s. Each factor scores out of 20, giving a total out of 100:
| Factor | Measures | Max |
|---|---|---|
| Temporal Displacement | How far removed is the brand from the 1970s? | 20 |
| Technology Gap | Does the brand rely on technology that did not exist? | 20 |
| Cultural Dissonance | How much does the brand clash with 70s culture? | 20 |
| Visual Contrast | How different is the brand's aesthetic from the era? | 20 |
| Concept Absurdity | How absurd is the idea of this brand existing then? | 20 |
The highest-scoring brands -- those with the greatest anachronistic tension -- consistently produced the most compelling images. A streaming service in a vinyl era. An electric car brand in the age of muscle cars. A social media platform before the internet existed.
How It Was Built
The Result
Modern Retro grew from a creative experiment into a fully functioning visual brand. 96 brands have been reimagined, each with a curated image, a score, and a place in the gallery. The site includes a print store powered by Stripe and Printful -- customers can buy framed prints of their favourite reimagined brands.
The project caught attention because it sits at the intersection of nostalgia, brand culture, and AI creativity. It is not just AI-generated images -- it is a creative concept with a clear point of view, executed consistently across 96 brands.
The Key Insight
The more anachronistic the brand, the more compelling the image. Tension is the creative engine.
The best images were not the obvious ones. Coca-Cola in the 70s is barely interesting -- it actually existed. But Spotify in 1974, with a storefront selling some imagined physical music subscription? That is where the creative magic happens. The gap between what a brand is and what the era was -- that tension is what makes every image a conversation starter.
Modern Retro proved that AI image generation is most powerful not as a production tool, but as a concept tool. The idea came first. The technology served the idea. Not the other way round.