The Illness Called Nostalgia

I blame this post entirely on Avina and Beby. Go check them both out; they're cool and stylish people who will enrich your life. 

Note that this post, unlike most of what I write, is not entirely (or even mostly) about J-fashion. It's about an essentially global supertrend which envelops almost the whole cultural zeitgeist, from film to advertising to music to clothing. It's also pretty high falutin' language-wise: this is me going hog wild. 

Nostalgia rules contemporary fashion. With the current polycrisis, history seems to be an out for many, from kids just dipping their toes into fashion to the mature creative directors at the helms of established fashion houses. 

Nostalgia was first classified in 1688, not as a benign feeling of retrospective fondness, but as a disease. This word, coined for the desperate melancholy of conscripted soldiers far from home, gradually redefined itself into the bittersweet hindsight we know today. It's important to remember the diseased roots of this sickly tree: no matter how fondly we recall the past, devoting your life to it is an illness. Remembering things, even colored with the rose glasses of youth, is not inherently bad as long as the past stays past. Forcing a return to that filtered imagination of history is the key symptom of the nostalgic disease. Retrogressive ideology is more than just evil, it's sickly. 

Vintage references are omnipresent in fashion discourse these days. Avina sent links to this Beauty & Beyond video and this Hiral Arora Substack post, both relating to retrospection. They're both pretty short, but they highlight several aspects of fashion: the preponderance of archival fashion looks (particularly in Law Roach's styling), current teens' reliance on preexisting subcultures and turbid microtrends, and the absence of any definite identity for the 2020s.  To me, there are really two major groupings of nostalgia here, corresponding roughly to leisure and working classes. 

Bourgeois nostalgia 

Upper class, bourgeois nostalgia, as highlighted by the heavy use of archival and vintage reproduction pieces in celebrity styling, is largely due to the consolidation of industry power by major conglomerates like LVMH under the helm of the Business Idiots. Drawing on archives is safe, proven, effective. The material quality is better, the thoughts are pre-thunk, and the wearer gets to show their knowledge of the past and access to inaccessible garments. Designs can be remade, but actual vintage garments are finite. The ultimate status symbol is a garment that's not just inaccessible for its price, but also permanently limited due to its past. 

Hiral Arora's Substack post points out Law Roach as a major contributor to the archival focus in celebrity styling. Law Roach is both a stylist to celebrities and a celebrity himself, and he lives a life familiar to me as a recovering historian-- he knows fashion history so well that he lives the past in the present. As Arora describes it, Roach completely redefined the stylist's role, creating from whole cloth a focus on accessing archival garments.

Business Idiots, armed with MBAs and no love for fashion, are even more to blame. The Business Idiot is a creature that looks down on consumers and artists for living in material reality, rather than their fantasy of Line Go Up. Business Idiots determine the priorities of major mainstream fashion brands like Chanel, Versace, and the entire LVMH megaconglomerate; although there are small houses constantly innovating (see Bliss Foster's journalism for some highlights!), they're drowned out by a flood of recycled ideas pouring from the biggest names in fashion. 

Predictable house codes and logomania (the centering of logos as a design element, as popularized by Dapper Dan's reimaginings of luxury items) are catnip to the Business Idiot, who wants ideal return on investment for minimal risk. Business Idiots love leaning on brand names for status while enshittifying products. Polyester blends priced as the genuine article, poor quality control, and innovation strangled by adherence to a brand ideal are all hallmarks of fashion controlled by finance.   

Working class nostalgia 

The flip side of this is the nostalgic tendency in the working classes, the youth demographic, and subculture. The current generation of teens and young adults, a demographic which has driven fashion innovation and subcultures for (by my flapper-oriented reckoning) about a century, is more alienated than ever. Although third spaces for teens and young adults--e.g. cheap music venues and malls -- have been in decline my entire life, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic really kicked things into high gear. 

Subculture, to grow distinct from the main culture, needs just a few things to flourish: dedicated spaces, shared interests, and commitment. The physical spaces were already in decline, but COVID-19 meant that physical isolation became mandatory. At the same time, the dedicated digital spaces where people used to engage online with subculture-- blogs, forums, and other specific websites-- have been flattened by elite capture. When everyone is on the same four apps, all of which are controlled by billionaires, dedicating space becomes impossible. 

Moreover, algorithm-driven feeds mean that people are engaging less, consuming more, and not even in control of their own consumption. There's no guarantor of substantial shared interests or experiences when a post can come flying down someone's For You Page without any input. You don't need to have a beach house or a retirement fund to enjoy Coastal Grandma outfits-- all you need is the wide-brim hat and the loose white cardigan. A style without any experience to anchor it, even just the experience of finding it yourself, is no different from a costume chosen from a Party City shelf. 

Commitment decreased since 2020 because people no longer had to invest in subcultures: they don't mentally need to invest as much in discovering, researching, and really sitting with the information they consume; there's no physical investment in physically going to the local club; and the financial investment became basically frictionless with affordable sponsored products on every other post. Enshittification and fast fashion are practically synonymous, after all-- quality decreases with both speed and price, and microtrends on TikTok shop are scraping the bottom of the barrel on all three. Picking up an entire outfit in a whole new style requires just as little commitment today as ordering a pizza. 

With these powers combined, it's easy to see why TikTok trends fall into two main categories: microtrends and nostalgic subcultures. There is no such thing as a Tomato Girl meetup or a Corpcore comm because these are transient microtrends with no space, no attached interests that extend beyond the screen. On the other hand, TikTok is funneling people into existing styles like goth,  gyaru, decora, and yes, even lolita, but these newbies have lopsided views and often have trouble adapting to the subcultures in real life.

It's much easier to adapt an existing subculture's style as a microtrend than it is to create something novel. The all encompassing hustle culture doesn't promote true newness, only marketable novelty. Established subcultures have intracommunity expectations that can be treated almost as a shopping list for astute content creators. But even if someone looks the part from the get-go, the hard work of making a real community takes much longer than a short form video can show. Moreover, many of the TikToks I've seen have biased or outright wrong information on the subculture styles they're apparently about; even if it's intentional ragebaiting, misinformation weakens the community. 

I feel like the biggest youth subculture of today isn't original, or even a continuation of the subcultures from which the nostalgic looks draw-- it's microtrends writ large. The eclectic performance of different aesthetics is the culture in itself, whether for one's own desire for experimentation or the constant pull of potential fame as an influencer. Social media is an attention economy: the constant novelty of microtrends is an excellent way to earn social currency and possibly transform it into cold, hard PayPal balances. The quick turnover may be promoted by the algorithm, but it's real people behind the screens. 

Kids want to be influencers and Kalshi gamblers today because they see people putting in the real effort for careers and being eaten alive by the machinery of techno-capital, while those who do nothing or make the world worse reap all the rewards. The dream job today is faking it 'til you make it. For teens today, getting lucky with algorithms is the only future they believe they have access to. 

Is there still progress?

Duh. Dopamine dressing, independent slow fashion brands, limited artist drops, and remake culture-- these are all picking up steam even amidst the noxious mire of microtrend consumerism. I've seen movement away from the polished newness and destructive distressing of my childhood towards curated visible mending. To ignore these movements towards sustainable, aware, and personalized fashion is to ignore the efforts of countless artists and artisans working against hostile algorithms. 

Dopamine dressing is choosing clothes for oneself based solely on personal happiness, even if it's also performed for the algorithm. Slow fashion brands and limited artist drops fight rapidfire release cycles using personal investment in an artist/designer to generate enough attention/income to be economically viable. Remakes and thrift flips are one-of-a-kind by nature-- representations and iterations of an item can spread, but the uniqueness of the thing itself is part of the charm. All of these are spread and mediated by algorithmic content feeds, yes, but they transcend those limits. These are fashion meant to be worn and lived. 

Additionally, secondhand clothing is more accepted across socioeconomic classes than I've seen it in my lifetime. It does play into nostalgia and is probably a recession indicator (what isn't?), but the nostalgic/archival turn of both bourgeois and proletarian varieties actually has a sustainable edge to it. Furthermore, there's a whole spectrum of wear and weathering that's now appreciated, including perfectly tailored originals, DIY thrift flips, lived-in distressing, and transformative visible mending. Even amongst people with a normal ignorance of fashion, there's a general awareness of the sheer quantity of existing clothes. We don't need more clothes! We just need to do something with them. 

A decade's fashion identity takes another decade or two to fully coagulate. Contrary to the assertions in the Beauty & Beyond video, there are definitely some decade-scale shifts in fashion that are already visible: barrel-leg silhouettes, the reimagined Basque waist, and blush-heavy makeup all seem to be sticking around for multiple years, and none of them are particularly nostalgic. Calling the 2020s hollowly nostalgic when we're not even halfway through is preemptive at best, and is condescending to today's artists who are making their art work despite the algorithmic pressures. 

What's the prognosis?

Fascism, as we know from Walter Benjamin, is an ideology of aesthetics alone, one that is often deeply nostalgic. 

This might seem at odds with fascist utilization of technology for and in visual works, such as the violent dynamism of the Italian Futurists under Mussolini or the contemporary use of generative algorithms for war propaganda. But these technological futures are not truly forward looking-- they seek to perpetuate violence, to subjugate creativity and nature, to conquer and immiserate and abuse. The shiny steel-and-glass futures proposed by these futurists are apocalyptic cancers, more everything forever until the whole universe dies under the weight of its own expansion. Furthermore, these false futures are uniformly misogynistic-- the blueprint of the fascist future is the creation of a structural steel frame to cage the world for a man's enjoyment. The gun is the car is the phallus is your dad. 

Nostalgic fashion without criticism is just another bar of the cage. Each uncritical repetition of the past, whether the glossy hypercapitalist futurism of Y2K or the escapist rural fantasy of tradwife prairie dresses, just bars off more potential futures. 

But sentimental nostalgia has a treatment-- thought. To stride ahead into an unimagined future would be an efficient speedrun of all the thoughtless failures of the past. Nostalgia is best treated through recognition, critical history, and learning from past mistakes. 

Authenticity, contemplation, labor for labor's sake: fascism hate these comrades. The work promoted by fascist aesthetics is the blood-and-soil work of violence or of perpetual drudgery in service to imagined agrarian patriarchal ideals. The thoughtful labor of innovating in craft is opposed both to the masculinized fascist ideal of shiny weaponized mass-production and the feminized fascist ideal of isolating reproductive work without thought or agency.  

Knitting is a perfect case study for the ahistorical devaluation of advancements in (feminized) craft. Hand knitting is seen by outsiders as atemporal, something that's probably been the same for like 200 years or something, which is as far back as most people usually contemplate. It's not. Knitting is full of constant discourse, innovation, discussion, and discovery: it's mathematics innovated through labor. The I-cord, a versatile creation which is invaluable for hand-knit edges and drawstrings, was popularized in the 1980s by Elizabeth Zimmermann-- a far cry from the dowdy historical reputation that knitting holds. 

This applies to nearly every craft, particularly hobbies and particularly women's hobbies. No matter how static they seem to outsiders, a moment's actual research reveals just how far things have come, how decades upon decades of entirely voluntary labor have made modern spinning and woodburning and jewelrymaking, disciplines which have followed humanity for millennia, into vibrant contemporary artforms. Representations of feminine labor as timeless and unchanging are as inauthentic as they come. 

The fascist "authenticity" is a nostalgic one created to sell celery-flavored jello and cigarettes, postcards and patriotism. Every era has its challenges: the real past, the one we should learn from, may not have had social media, but it had complex, thoughtful people facing their own struggles with poverty, war, illness, loss, identity, and all the other myriad miseries that color the shades of the human experience. To disregard the complexity of your ancestors' lives is to infantilize them and yourself.  

We live in the information age, which means the deep research to actually understand the context of previous styles and subcultures is as available as its ever been to outsiders, as long as the researcher doesn't take the easy way out and use an LLM. 

We need to study the past, recognize its flaws, borrow what we can, and move the fuck on. I like wearing old clother because I like it; it's comfy, cheap, easy to wash, and easy to wear. But outside of cosplay, I don't mimic specific people or outfits of the past. For one thing, in lolita, those people are my very alive friends and they'd probably be a little skeeved out. I don't wear alternative fashion to become someone else-- I wear it to be myself. 

I'm not old, but I'm sure as hell not a kid anymore. I like feeling like I'm pushing forward with style! But I don't think it should be be up to people my age what the future looks like. Children have the most future ahead of them: it's not algorithms or the past or people with graduate degrees who should shape the future, it has to be the kids who will live it.