Nostalgia, as Mark Fisher predicted, has never been more potent. We can’t stop longing for the past – and increasingly, even the very recent past, via the “nowstalgia” of rapid-cycling trends – at the expense of creating something genuinely novel.

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted... See more