Wait, 2016 Is Cool Again?
· Paige Karchmar · Trends / Culture
The 2010s are officially back, which is strange when you're 19 and those years were your childhood.
Apparently we're already bringing back 2016. That's weird for me, because I'm 19, and in 2016 I was still in elementary school.
I was reading a Harper's Bazaar article about everyone suddenly being obsessed with the 2010s, and some of it is honestly hilarious. People are searching TikTok for old Garage tops, skinny jeans are making a comeback, and girls in SoHo are taking outfit pictures on an iPhone 4 or 5c, on purpose, and posting them with VSCO-style filters.
According to the article, "OG Garage Tops" hit 4.9 million TikTok searches this summer, and "nostalgia for the year 2018" reached 1.83 million searches in a single week. I guess we've officially run out of decades to bring back and started recycling our own childhoods.
The Stuff We Swore Was Over
What's funny is how embarrassing a lot of this was not that long ago. My generation basically declared skinny jeans dead on TikTok a few years back, everyone wanted the newest iPhone camera, and posting one heavily filtered Instagram picture felt extremely 2015.
Now those same things are cool again, and I think it's because we actually remember them. Y2K was fun to borrow, but none of us were born yet. The 2010s are the first era we were there for, even if we were watching from the back seat: the songs on the radio, the filters, the outfits on older girls at the mall that we couldn't wait to be old enough to wear.
So I kind of get it. There's something fun about seeing the stuff you grew up around come back, especially when you never expected anyone to want it again.
So What Does This Mean for Brands?
I don't think businesses need to slap VSCO filters on everything or restock whatever they sold in 2016. But there's something worth paying attention to: people love recognizing something they haven't thought about in years, especially when it's tied to a good memory.
If you own a boutique, maybe there's an older style your customers would be excited to see again. If you run a café, maybe it's bringing back a drink people used to love. Even posting an old photo of your shop and asking customers what they remember could start a fun conversation.
The trick is making it feel like a rediscovery. You don't have to pretend it's 2016. Bring back something people loved and give it a small update so it makes sense now. If it reads as a business chasing a trend, people my age will notice immediately.
Are We Really That Old Already?
The funniest part of all this is that people my age are already nostalgic for when we were kids. I always thought nostalgia was something that happened when you were, like, 40. Instead, here we are at 19, getting excited about old Instagram filters and the mall tops we wanted so badly in elementary school.
I'm not sure I'm ready for skinny jeans to take over again, but I wouldn't mind posting a picture without choosing between 15 nearly identical versions. And if someone brings back the original Instagram filters, I might actually use one.