I’m not saying that this is entirely a bad thing. If you’ve turned on the TV, opened the internet, or flipped through the radio any time lately you know that the 80s are here yet again and for whatever reason they just won’t leave. Our ready access to the past means that nostalgia is more difficult to track and even more omnipresent, as anyone could steep themselves in the media of another decade, transporting themselves back to the past.īecause of this, media is a different animal. But today, as Kurt Andersen from Vanity Fair argues, things have fallen into a design rut : “ Now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past.” This rut shows its face in many facets of design, from our architecture, to our clothes, to our media. The 90s grunge movement served as an almost dirtier version of the 70s’ counter-culture. Fashion of the 80s was an evolution of 60s beatnik fashion. The 70s were marred with nostalgic media harkening back to the extremely white-washed vision of the nuclear family happy days of the 50s. In the last few decades, nostalgia has been difficult to track. Because of this, nostalgia cycles are debated to move in 20 years, 30 years, and 40 years. People that are now nostalgic for 80s pop culture could have been children, teenagers, or 20-somethings in the 80s, all of which would have put them at a ripe age to have been soaking in their surroundings, while likely ignoring or only having a basic understanding of more serious things. This idea of cycles admittedly becomes a little fuzzy when considering age ranges. Unless I were creating something biting and more realistic, chances are there would be no mention of 9/11, the Iraq War, or the housing crisis. When I get to be in my early 30s and if I were to produce any kind of “throwback media” it would likely be tinged with the pop culture sensibilities that I remember as a child, fondly cherry-picking at what I remember positively. When I think nostalgia, I think late 90s and early-mid 2000s pop culture like Pokémon, the Star Wars prequels, and Britney Spears. So naturally, I’m nostalgic for things that were popular when I was a child – images that bring me back to a time when I didn’t know anything about global conflict, politics, or targeted marketing. At the time of writing this, I am 20 years old. Nostalgia moves in cycles, but not clearly defined cycles. “Ready Player One” is on its way out, Bruno Mars just won a Grammy for a throwback album, and “Stranger Things” remains one of Netflix’s hottest shows: 80s throwbacks are still all the rage, but why? Were the 80s that great of a decade?
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