Have you noticed the 30-year cycle in fashion at all? In the 2010’s we were all hosting 80’s parties, wearing outfits that Madonna pioneered, going rollerskating to 80’s nights. Nowadays it seems like 90’s fashion, like baggy jeans and sports brands hoodies are everywhere, and there is even a few 90’s nights in the clubs now. How to make us all feel old!
Well, perhaps not. Is it possible we’re all wearing the trends of yesteryear to, in fact, be transported? Read on to see what we think.
Culture
You don’t need to look too far to see that nostalgia is influencing a lot of pop culture nowadays.
In cinema, for example, nostalgia is its bestselling commodity. Just looking at the listings of movies over the past few years, a fraction of them are originals, meaning not a sequel, prequel or spin off of an existing franchise, and far fewer of them break the top selling tickets.
In pop music, new and big names have all dipped their toes into the pop punk genre that defined the early 00’s and the emo culture, meanwhile Bruno Mars is bringing back soul with hit after hit, and you can hear James Brown’s influence in.
Plus, not to put too fine a note on it, the amount of people talking about re-binging The Office (US), despite not being as old as some other examples, points to some idea of why nostalgia is so enjoyable for consumers.
Video games and iGaming titles too are throwing back to aesthetics and stylings of previous decades. Remakes and remasting of old classics continue to enter the market and perform well, many eager fans keen to immerse themselves in the updated masterpieces. By extension, platform-slider mechanics, for instance, and other dominant mechanics are still widely incorporated into contemporary games, though slightly updated due to new capabilities. In the iGaming industry, the stylings of retro slots like Bowling Frenzy and Ready, Set, Cash! immerse the gamers in the related decades, creating that transportive feeling, even if the gamer hadn’t experienced casino or arcade games in that decade.
Nostalgia
On the surface, nostalgia is about enjoying something you never had the chance to experience, or want to experience again. Usually, it comes with a virtual flashback, or a feeling of being there again. Ultimately, the point of entertainment in particular, is to make you feel something, be transported.
As an extension of this, entertainment intending to tap into the nostalgic feeling we all know is looking to transport you to a different time. So how does that affect you, the consumer of that entertainment?
This transportive feeling isn’t discriminative. The consumers of nostalgic products go for the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80, 90s, and even the 2000s. Even then, some of these products are a mash of decades, taking flavours and creating something new.
Consumers will find cultural products that look specific tied to a decade, and others that are difficult to pin down. This is part of our relationship to history. We play with it because it is always changing.
Also, though, it is because we want to experience something new, different, foreign to our current experience. We look back fondly on the entertainment and lifestyles of the 40s, the 70s because it isn’t what we have now.
Have we run out of ideas?
On the surface, it might look like the world has run out of ideas, and to those asking, we would say “yes and no”.
Are there companies peddling out the same stuff they know we like in order to give us a short sharp dose of dopamine that will often be traded for money? Sure. But there are also innovative people building off the greats of the past, or even the mundane of the past, and making them even greater.
For example, what is considered now the best X-Men movie, in a franchise made up of dozens, is just Wolverine in a Western. The e-girl trend in fashion is taking elements of the 80’s and adapting them. Pop art, once purposefully without purpose for a dose of beautiful nihilism, is full of depth today.
The Mickey Mouse’s of the world may hand you a sub-par sequel and ask for £35 for the privilege of watching it, but the best things in life take inspiration from the past and create something amazing in our future.
For example, you can’t say that fashion today is taking from one particular era and is simply rehashing what was done before. 80’s era scrunchies are back, but so are 90’s baggy jeans. Elements of different eras are being brought together, with our own additions, and are being combined into new looks that couldn’t have been predicted.
We are not rehashing ideas, but building off of them.
