Can We Stop Looking Back in Fashion?

Nostalgia no longer feels new, so why do we keep going back to it?

- by LingJie Tuang

There was a time when nostalgia felt new.

In the midst of constantly pushing forward, looking back came with a sense of repose. Hot off the extremities of 2010s fashion — from the high-octane indie sleaze revival consisting of noisy prints and manufactured distressing, to the stark, near-monastic minimalist tribes of Celine's Philophile — the late 2010s to the early 2020s seemed a lot less optimistic about the future. It was hardly surprising, given the state of a soon-to-be-pandemic-ridden world that required an immediate pause to reassess what truly mattered. When the future was presented as uncertain, we turned towards the past for a sense of solace. I will never forget the first time I came across the Dior Saddle Bag in person, which was reissued in 2018 — the bag had only been seen through grainy screengrabs of Carrie Bradshaw toting it in Sex and the City. There was an air of novelty in seeing something that looked like it belonged to a different time. The same could be said about J.Lo’s green Versace dress reappearing on the runway nearly two decades after it debuted on The Grammy Awards’ red carpet to close out Versace’s 2020 show. Self-referencing seemed less common, subversive, even.

What ensued in fashion over the next five years to the present day has been a constant stream of nostalgia. From fashion runways to red carpet moments to real-life styling, nostalgia has become a common theme tethered to what engages and converts. Beyond reissues of classic Mugler suits through their H&M collaboration, Thierry Mugler's infamous Fall 1995 Metropolis robot suit garnered USD13.3 million worth of media value for the label when Zendaya wore it for the