Y2K style resurgence and nostalgia: what brands need to know

Image credited to @yobabyem

https://www.instagram.com/adolescentcontent/p/CWT5xj8FywV/?img_index=1 

TL;DR 

A fun-sized summary of this article

• Nostalgia’s always been a goldmine for brands; it’s kind of low-hanging fruit. Except nowadays, looking to the past has a new purpose. 

• As the world gets more connected, people are more inclined to opt for Do Not Disturb, in all respects. Longing for simpler days (and tech) becomes pretty appealing when you grow up with screens constantly in your face. 

• Brands have the opportunity to do nostalgia in a new way, and reimagine the in ways that feel meaningful to today’s audience.

There should be a word invented for the numbness of overstimulation; it’s astounding Urban Dictionary has yet to cook that up. 

The only thing that comes close is digital burnout, but even that is still not quite right. To the disillusioned and disconnected, the future looks like static - unintelligible and formless. Social media has a way of compressing time; as a result, history is passing us by faster than we can process it, and it’s leaving young people unsteady. Not quite sick with anxiety yet? Picture this: someday, kids will study Twitter threads in social studies. Honestly… they probably already do. 

Alright; that should do the trick. 

Apologies for the sense of doom that idea inevitably invoked in your heart, but it was a necessary evil to deploy. Otherwise, how else does Gen Z’s downright obsession with nostalgia seem even remotely sane? We have that sense of doom just sort of idling in our brains constantly. And though time offline can thin the fog it brings, there’s no off button. This, among a few other notable reasons, is why Urban Outfitters is selling iPod shuffles on their site. Wait, actually - sold. Past tense. Because they completely sold out.

Adult-olesence and the Y2K style

Many of us would do anything to be a kid again. Or, maybe just an adult with a promise of a different kind of future, pre-dotcom bubble (and burst). Arguably this could be some strange strain of Peter Pan syndrome (I am but a 23-year-old teenager! blah blah, internet nonsense, ect) - but Gen Z’s Adult-olesence has really sucked, with every major marker in our coming-of-age warped by the breakneck pace of change. So we look back with an unquestionably altering gaze, reconstructing the past around totems of nostalgia (which, conveniently, have free shipping included). Nostalgia, like retail therapy and using Klarna on your Doordash, is a bittersweet self-soothe; lovely, until the sepia filter flickers and you watch your credit score drop 8 points. 

There’s a yearning for things that are simultaneously timeless and dated - like the shiny velvet of Juicy Couture or old-school Starbucks (honestly, any coffee shop that feels a touch warmer than a hospital waiting room - when did oat milk lattes come with a free side of liminal unease and nowhere to sit?). The Y2K style resurgence single-handedly made leopard print cool again. And retro tech - flip phones, Tamagotchis, and Nintendo DS consoles - have a crazy resale market. Perhaps because all of those things bring us back to a time that felt simpler, happier. 

But Gen Z’s fixation on nostalgia is threaded with a cannibalistic undercurrent - devouring memories (no matter how recent) and reconstructing them into tchotchkes that promise to take us backward, toward that feeling we’re grasping at. It feels like we’ve stumbled on something profound; but mostly, it’s just swapping chrome for plastic.

Brands who get it 

With this in mind, nostalgia has never had more marketplace power. Monica Lewinsky, Fran Drescher, Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy are social media darlings - not for their internet presence, but because Gen Z idolized their legacy in online spaces. Screw scandals and sexism; nostalgia can incite a sort of justice too. In 2024, these women pop culture once loved to hate are the faces of campaigns for Reformation, AMI Paris, Proenza Schouler, and Skims. 

Indulging the past - and your audience’s desire for it - can make people understand it in new ways. Not exactly a rebrand, but a remix. The culture will always have an appetite for nostalgia bait, but this market has enough creative fast-food equivalents; brands have come back from the grave through the power of a clever campaign, but the strategy needs to be substantive.