Nostalgia and Fashion
Nostalgia for the past is by no means a new thing. It isn’t just kids these days who believe they were born in the wrong generation, because culture has always been cyclical to a degree. The style of the 00s making a comeback with the “Y2K aesthetic” craze is no surprise at all. Many fashion scholars reference the idea of a 20 year cycle. The 50s heavily borrowed from the style of the 1930s, which borrowed in turn from the 1900s. Despite this, nostalgia today feels different somehow.
Walking into clothing stores is jarring, with the most chic decade changing from rack to rack. 60s style babydoll dresses hang right next to a bedazzled tank top right out of an early 2000s pop music video. Right next to that rack is a shelf of neatly folded sweaters with orange and brown stripes, which makes my mom cringe. “I haven’t seen that color combo since the 70s,” She says.
There’s nothing wrong with mixing it up, but this isn’t your eccentric friend’s closet. This is a store where consumers are catered to, and that catering can be reflective of our broader culture. The mess on the shelves seems to signify that the caterers have lost the plot. There is a lack of definable culture. If this mixing pot of decades came from a place of growing personal style and self expression that was just too strong for businesses to understand, that would be one thing. I don’t think that’s the case though. It’s hard not to think this has more to do with our attention spans.
In recent years we have witnessed the death of the trend. Instead of a style lasting a year or season, now a trend might last only a month. This is called a microtrend. Historically we have categorized fashion into decades, and while there is usually variance throughout the years with an “early 80s” look being different from a “late 80s” look, what we are seeing now is different. Anecdotally, I have heard people my age reference style as “2020” style, making specific reference to the styles that people experimented with during the pandemic. I can remember specific months and years where things went quickly in and out of vogue. Remember VSCO girls being all the rage? That lasted for five minutes fashion time.
Nostalgia and Music
Why does that matter? What does that have anything to do with music? The modern obsession with nostalgia has a lot of implications for the way that music develops culturally. Already there are a myriad of other complex and intertwined things to think about when it comes to modern music culture. The way that algorithms drive much of our music consumption, the lack of as many places for people to go and meet other like-minded music fans and bond over shared culture, the list goes on. So how does nostalgia fit into those problems?
Listening to old music is easier than ever. That’s something I think is a good thing, especially because I love a lot of old music. However, the implications for new musicians trying to make their mark are worrying. When people mainly used CDs, buying and supporting new music made the most sense. First of all, the chance that your parents had any old music you wanted to listen to was a pretty decent. Second of all, supporting new music made sense. It was what you saw in stores and people working there could recommend new albums to you.
The constant availability provided by streaming creates a buffer between the listener and the artist. Streaming services work on an algorithm. If you listen to old music, you will continue to have old music recommended to you. New artists have to perform more marketing than ever before, with becoming a social media influencer almost being a prerequisite to success. Nostalgia doesn’t last in a meaningful way, with decades cycling faster than a new music movement could be built by taking cues from that nostalgia.
In pictures we look at in the future, will we be able to discern what decade a photo is from? Will we be able to remember all of the fashion microtrends? Without visually distinct markers, are these photos going to feel out of time and place entirely? In the same vein, are we at risk of losing musical movements? When someone says 80s music, a synth goes off in my brain. I hear the pop hits cycle through my head. With algorithms tailoring themselves to each individual, is it possible that we will lose that kind of cultural marker?
Ironically, by writing this article I am falling into the very same trap of nostalgia that I am wondering about. I don’t want to come across like I’m talking about “the good old days” where corporate radio controlled what people were allowed to hear, and when producers had control over what got made. Right now, anyone can make music and publish it themselves, and there is a beauty in that freedom. However, the nostalgic culture we find ourselves in provides a challenge for these new artists. They aren’t just competing with each other, they are competing with all of the music we have at our fingertips.