This sort of nostalgia is somewhat new. Our parents didn’t spend their 20s yearning for the clothing of their youth, so what are the driving forces behind Gen Z and millennials’ obsession with childhood? The Psychology of Fashion explains that due to rapid advances in technology in the 1990s and the development of social media, “opportunities for exposure to fashion imagery have increased significantly” and “social networking sites are becoming the most influential medium for the promotion and distribution of fashion ideas and ideals.” WGSN has been tracking the revival of Y2K fashion and culture on social media over the past few years, finding a number of social media accounts dedicated to nostalgia for the fashion, films and music of the 1990s and 2000s. And as the first generations to grow up online, Gen Z and millennials are said to spend more time on social media than any other generation. We are therefore being exposed to the vast amount of nostalgic content out there at a much more rapid rate than our predecessors.
