Bidirectional Nostalgia
Bidirectional Nostalgia
Our revivalist decade explained
Last spring, I shared my schematic of nostalgia:
At the broadest level, it occurs in twenty-year cycles.
And compounds as eras become nostalgic for past eras, which were themselves nostalgic for another.
The twenty-year cycle follows a generational pattern, which I suspect has something to do with our inherent curiosity about the time just beyond the horizon of our own consciousness—or in layman’s terms, what were my parents up to while I was in utero?
Nostalgia itself is a media effect.
It happens because we have abundant media dating from the period (books, movies, television, music, memes).
And a consumer culture that produces a surplus of clothing, furniture, cars, etc. that are still knocking around on the secondary market to this day.
Some eras are more nostalgic than others—the postmodern 80s, the mashup 00s, and now our AI-enabled 20s. (GANs like MidJourney and LLMs like ChatGPT are creating new things using old things as source material, much like postmodern architects and mashup mixtapes in their respective eras.)
These periods of self-conscious hyper-nostalgia are more eclectic as a result.
The nostalgia cycle is very predictable in terms of orientation—twenty years is twenty years—which is perhaps why it so annoys the creative classes. When everyone is talking about nostalgia, the self-selected avant-garde never wants to get caught doing it, too.
Hence what I would term ‘bidirectional nostalgia’—the flight of the cool kids to adjacent decades and aesthetics.
In the 2000s, when pop culture was explicitly nostalgic for the eighties—neo-goth emo, neo-new wave electroclash—you saw subcultures emerge that looked to the nineties and seventies for inspiration: nü-rave in the UK and indie folk in the US. In fact, circa 2005, during my first week at RISD, I remember a fellow student proclaiming that eighties nostalgia was out and nineties nostalgia was in.
They had YouTube account called @clintoneuphoria.
The same thing happened two years ago when “indie sleaze” was the fixation of the culture press. A friend returned to Los Angeles from New York and insisted it was all about 2010s nostalgia in the city. Jersey club reigned supreme. I immediately remembered the period around the release of Spring Breakers when far too many people were dressing like all their clothes had come from an Asbury Park beach shop.
As Labor Day closes out Brat Summer and my friends discuss buying tickets for the Oasis reunion tour, I see the same dynamic at play. CharliXCX’s mainstream breakthrough is bringing the avant-garde 2010s genre hyperpop to the H&M-shopping masses. Meanwhile, the Britpop aesthetic has been percolating since last summer on TikTok under the moniker blokecore and its femme avatar blokette. In our eclectic hyper-nostalgic era, it’s not enough for The Dare to be crowned harbinger of an “electroclash revival” (80s) by The New York Times; we also need Charli to lead a “hyperpop revival” (10s) and Oasis to herald a “Britpop revival” (90s) as well—by selling 1.4 million tickets in 10 hours, no less.
