The past has never felt so close. Each TikTok trend, thrifted outfit and playlist revival pulls us back toward something familiar. What looks like a style movement is really an emotional one: a generation using nostalgia to feel safe in a changing world.
Every corner we turn, it feels like our past is calling us back. From low-rise jeans on racks again, film cameras sold out, to our playlists suspiciously sounding like we are back getting ready for the middle school football games. It’s our coping mechanism in beauty form, using nostalgia as emotional comfort, not just a trend.
We’re not caught up on trends, we’re caught up on a feeling, the warmth of something familiar in an ever-more insecure world. Using nostalgia as a coping mechanism makes us feel safe amidst uncertainty. Behaving as if we are still within the eras where the largest issue was whether or not we charged our iPod Nano is a coping mechanism.
Operating from what previously comforted us in a time when our own world feels at risk. Occasionally, revisiting those memories or returning to those looks is how we bring joy back into daily life.
Even brands have noticed. Every day, companies with large presences like Pepsi, Nike and Barbie are learning into throwback marketing. This marketing tactic is to connect with the younger audience.
Use this as a reminder that even corporate America knows the power that a good memory holds. Nostalgia sells because it reminds us of comfort and comfort sells because we’re all quietly searching for it. But our obsession goes deeper than recycled trends.
Nostalgia offers control in a world that is constantly changing for Gen Z. We are FAR too young to miss the early 2000s, but that does not stop us from craving the simplicity that those years represented. Maybe it’s not the era itself we miss, but who we were before life got heavier, before “growing up” became a full-time job.
Psychologists say that nostalgia helps someone stabilize while they are under stress. Looking back to what we loved and feeling nostalgia is a common act of self-care. Nostalgia holds the ability to boost our optimism and reminds us of who we used to be before the sound of “adulthood”.
In coping with nostalgia, we have to remember the fine line between comfort and escapism. Holding as a gentle reminder that we’ve made it through before we can again. We can use nostalgia as a way of coping, but with the hope that we are not living in this fantasy.
Living too much in reminiscing will not allow us to make new memories, which will later be our new comfort zone. We have to bring what we love about it to where we are now. This could be why “retro revival” doesn’t yet feel tired: it is not about pretending the old days were perfect, but remembering what made us feel alive, finding a way to feel like that again.
Nostalgia isn’t regression; it’s a translation of memory into meaning. My advice is to keep your butterfly hairclips, your flip phone filters and continue singing those songs that bring you back to getting ready for the middle school football games. Do not continue to look at nostalgia as regression, but begin to look at it as the bridge between who we were and who we still want to become.