#13: trends
and Hollister-induced nostalgia
Hear: Is there a word for the panic you feel when your phone starts to play a video at full volume when you thought you’d turned your sound off
I have it at least twice a day because I’m living in my house like a cartoon bank robber—creeping over floorboards that I know creak, peering in rooms where I’ve managed to get her to sleep. It reminds me of this Karen Russell article I read in 2017 about baby monitors with this line I still think about regularly: “Each night, more footage bloomed: two huge albino manatees, floating spectrally through the nursery. If it’s strange to spy on your baby, it may be even weirder to become a voyeur of your midnight selves.”
If there’s not a word for this phenomenon, we should invent one.
See: The blobby book cover seems to have run its course
(Elizabeth Gilbert’s designer didn’t get that memo)
We’ve seemed to move on to some new trends. Some are riding the old-timey animals train, but strolling through Barnes & Noble last week I saw one that I’ve deemed the I Just Discovered Photoshop Cover. To my amateur Photoshopper eye (ok, I use the Magnetic Lasso tool and wonder if I should start a career in graphic design), piling images on for a homemade collage feel or just isolating images like these pillows or this apple/optical illusion feels like a pendulum swing from the blob. Sharper, rougher edges like the ones we managed to get with kitchen scissors and a pile of old magazines. I’m still thinking about whether I like it or not because I’m not immune to marketing tactics as much as I’d like to be.
Touch: A Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin.
I realize now more than ever that reading is a practice, like exercising. If I start and stop and start and stop and tell myself that I’ll wake up tomorrow with the motivation to do it, I promise, it won’t happen. BUT reading is important, I remind myself before I turn on a show I’ve seen 10,000 times.
AND SPEAKING OF BOOKS AGAIN: I highly rec reading “The Publishing Industry Has A Gambling Problem” in The Walrus by Tajja Isen about the ever-precarious publishing industry. Even if you don’t care about the publishing industry or writers, it’s timely. Isen talks with industry veterans and authors about who’s getting published and who’s getting pushed out and how “what’s undeniable is that the market has become harder to break into for writers whose work does not scream commercial.”
Taste: No spice.
After some truly unbelievable gas from my baby, somebody told me that spicy food could be an irritant in my breastmilk. I’d been putting harissa mayo on my eggs every morning, so I decided to cut it out. Who’s not cutting spice out? Kate McKinnon in this delightful episode of Hot Ones.
Smell: Fall
I graduated from a Masters program in May and the back-to-school feelings are still in my body. I live by a high school and see kids walking to school everyday and feel a twinge of nostalgia for being a student. I think about nostalgia a lot and, being my age on social media, you start to notice there’s a generous amount of content that relies on nostalgia for engagement.
**
On Instagram, I was served a video of a woman around my age trying on clothes in a Hollister dressing room. The montage is set to “Ocean Avenue” by Yellowcard. She dons a denim skirt that’s the length of a pencil, a knit top with a tie in the back, a sweater with sleeves that purposely reach her fingertips. With every change, her face grows more and more incredulous. She can’t believe these clothes are being sold. Many of the 13,000 comments show solidarity with her:
“This made me nauseous.”
“why? And when did this happen”
“I miss those days SO much”
“Either brands have to survive off rage bait or nostalgia. Many of us prefer the latter.”
They’re in disbelief: the trends of the aughts are back. Of course, they’re always back because they never really go away.
Underneath the disbelief was a tsunami of nostalgia.
I am wary of nostalgia. I think about how my brain manufactures memories, how it ascribes meaning and hierarchy, how it can filter out the unpleasant parts to make me believe a certain part of my life was better for some reason. Was it better? Or am I choosing to remember only the parts that I can, in retrospect, make sense of. On a corporate level, I think about how collective nostalgia is formed—wishing for a specific time period or type of person or pop culture even when the wishers are people who weren’t there for the thing that’s being remembered. I think about how it can induce a paradoxical gateway: wishing for a certain past while the wisher reminds others that they were there first. “dont forget that the workers at hollister were born after this era” says one commenter on the Hollister post. There’s only so much room in the past, wishers seem to convey, and if you want to bring the past into our present, it needs to be on our terms.
But I can also be a participant in nostalgia. I was a teen in the aughts. I didn’t shop at Hollister because their clothes didn’t work for girls with even a whisper of curve, but I wrestled my way into an Abercrombie polo. I untangled necklaces in Rue21’s jewelry section. I tried on Bermuda shorts in the J.Crew dressing room despite the fact that the sales associate knew I didn’t have $98. I had a side part so deep it reached the equator. Fast fashion was already here but shopping online wasn’t the norm. I wore what I saw in stores, what I saw others wearing at the mall, at school, in magazines. Trends, like Miranda Priestley says, started somewhere far away selected by a select group of people before trickling down to the teens in my suburban orbit. Instagram wouldn’t be rampant until I was in college, but in 2007/2008 we got Facebook. Bored girls armed with digital cameras at sleepovers with Internet-less phones found their mediums. Hundreds of images of me, now scrubbed from the Internet (hopefully), were peppered throughout my friends’ albums. Leggings as pants, sweatpants with the legs pulled up to my mid-calf like Frodo Baggins, huge shirts that ballooned above the flimsy woven belt I wrapped around my waist giving me the shape of a mushroom.
I have so much documentation of that time. I have fondness for that time. I would never go back to the person I was. Or to what I was wearing.
**
I’m thinking about the Hollister video while I stroll my new born daughter, while I talk with friends about other much more pressing events in the world. I’m the demographic the creator is targeting—going into the bowels of the Hollister dressing rooms feels like yesterday. Millennials aren’t the first to see something come back into fashion (devastating). We won’t be the last. There’s nothing completely new under the sun in clothing trends—just revisions and reanimations.
But we are the first to have had the opportunity to chronicle every single item of clothing we wore and blast it out to the online world while we were teenagers. By chronicling it, we memorialized our tastes far more than generations past on platforms we still use—we post a photo of us from last week, but a few clicks or scrolls lands us on years-ago images of ourselves in clothing trends that are making a resurgence (again). But the trends are not ours this time. The world is moving faster than the speed of our grid even though we’re online all the time—we’re seeing a visual timeline leading to our own irrelevance.
Every generation before us discovered they weren’t the young ones anymore—however, they didn’t have the vehicle to tell the world how they felt about it at the touch of a button. They could talk about it with their friends or stew about someone wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt who, they assumed, couldn’t name any of their songs. But being online lets Millennials reel in real time and publicly. Look, we seem to say, we showed you how bad these trends are. We gave you millions of images and dozens of tv shows where our choices are on full display. Gen Z tells us we are cringey and then starts to wear what we wore.
**
Millennials aren’t the young ones anymore. We haven’t been for a little while now. We can’t seem to let history repeat itself but we also can’t let time be new because that means we have to make sense of something we thought we’d already figured out. That feeling starts to extend beyond fashion choices. Nostalgia becomes something to fight over, something to win, something that brings out versions of ourselves we’ve never been nostalgic for.
This creator has many videos roasting millennial culture which are extremely accurate to a certain suburban teen experience of the time. It is a little cringey in delivery—but she’s roasting the cringe while self-aware of her participation in the cringe. It’s ironic. It’s sarcastic. It wants to make someone happy. It kind of wants to be famous without pissing off too many people. It means well but doesn’t want to be taken too seriously. It is Millennial.
**