Our obsession with nostalgia is driving a trend revival spiral

There’s been a kind of flattening of the zeitgeist, leading to a monoculture that is understood across generations.

“Instead there is a constant attempt to recreate atmosphere. In the fantasy culture of the 1980s there is no real history, no real past; it is replaced by an instant, magical nostalgia, a strangely unmotivated appropriation of the past.” Put simply, it’s that hit of nostalgia, and the discovery of a new niche, that we’re after.

So the fevered search for the next ever-more-niche revival could be seen as a way for Gen Z to carve out a IYKYK (“if you know, you know”) point of difference and ring-fence a specific look, community or interest. For a limited time, anyway.

we’re not so much tripping over nostalgia, revivals and retro but hoarding them. We have become pack rats of our collective past.

“I find it positive that the references are getting more obscure, but also quite eerie,” she says. Say hello, then, to archaeological-core – although, as the revivals continue to spiral, even that might be over by the time you read this.

It used to be that time and distance were allowed before present culture plundered, to use Savage’s term, a past decade for style inspiration. Received wisdom put it at around 30 years, enough time for a new generation, and fresh eyes, to reassess.

we consume culture like we listen to podcasts: at 1.5x speed.

Now we’re overwriting the past ad nauseam, and at a greater speed. Take the goth-inclined subculture aesthetic known as Dark Academia. It could be seen as a 2022 version of a style from 2012 via 1992 via 1981 via 1964 via 1922 via 1880 via 1248. Dizzy, yet?

“For me, revival culture is gaining a sense of control over an ever-shifting cultural landscape and relocating oneself in the recent past in order to fully process the present. [It’s] a way of temporarily stopping time.”

While some of the current retro culture is anemoia – nostalgia for an era you didn’t live through, ie Hailey Bieber obsessing over the ’90s when her birth certificate reads 1996 – The Revival Spiral sees us leaning into a seemingly ever-hastening longing for the recent past.