“There’s so much interest in content that categorises and explains trends. It helps make sense of the discourse online and distinguish trends from fads.”

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

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.

The dictionary definition of nostalgia is a “pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again”.

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.

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?

the acceleration of nostalgia. We’re trapped in what might be called a Revival Spiral.

“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.