We are living in a time when the Friends: The Reunion is back on TV, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are rumoured to be dating (so ‘Bennifer’ is a thing again), and the revival to bring back ! Hello, low cut jeans – except for those of us who couldn’t bear to wear them the first time round.
The 90s fashion revival also apparently means the return of the jelly shoe which is the “summer’s unlikeliest shoe trend”. In a combination of nostalgic elements ex- child stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are releasing their own brand of jelly shoes which will cost you close to $2000AUD.
Nostalgia it seems is in fashion but why are we so desperate to cling to the past while living in a time when technological advancements are moving at rapid speed?
Much of it is to do with feeling a sense of comfort. Having lived through the most disruptive period in any of our lives due to COVID-19, we are wanting to turn to a time when things seemed to make sense. In fact there have been that have confirmed that we become nostalgic to cope during stressful periods in our lives. And what’s been more stressful than Covid?
For me, my sense of nostalgia has been disrupted by the fact that my daughter who is now in high school is making fashion choices inspired by the 90s. She recently bought a pair of dusky pink corduroy pants that reminded me of a pair of corduroy pants in the same shade I used to wear as a teenager.
“I used to wear a pair of pants just like these,” I told her with a touch of whimsy and she looked back at me with an OK, mum, look that perhaps showed she didn’t need historical references to her outfit choices.
My nostalgia is tainted with a greater more intense feeling of overwhelm watching my daughter become a young woman. But I can’t deny the pleasure I feel turning on an old episode of Seinfeld. It immediately transports me to when I was young, living with my brothers and parents as we would gather around the TV to watch the show together.
Nostalgia seems harmless in many ways, but it used to be considered a disorder. Until the 1980s some scientists even extreme nostalgia as something “that persists and profoundly interferes with the individual’s attempts to cope with his present circumstances.”
But recent research has shown that nostalgia can be a positive thing.
Dr Constantine Sedikides spoke about how nostalgia "has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety." He even helped develop the Southampton Nostalgia Scale and found that "elevates mood, self-esteem, and a sense of social connectedness; it fosters perceptions of continuity between past and present; it increases meaning in life; and it “fights off” death cognitions."
Of course we can have nostalgia for all sorts of things, but for many of us, watching TV shows and catching up on celebrity gossip, especially when some of it relates back to our past, is a way to find comfort in a world that seems increasingly out of our control.
The popular Instagram account for example is testament to the fact that so many of us (the account had 1.3 million followers and growing) are still looking for that nostalgia hit through cultural references. In fact polaroids from Friends in 1995 was one of the most
While Friends is a show I'm yet to watch with my daughter, her experience of it would be so different to mine. She will probably watch it like I watched TV shows from the 1970s - images from a world that I didn't fully understand. But for me watching Friends or Seinfeld is like stepping into a time that I can no longer go back to. Watching one of my favourite episodes from these shows is, at least for a brief moment in time, like being in my family home again with my parents sitting beside me and the smell of my mum's curry wafting from the kitchen.
And it's the thought of this more than the shows itself that brings a smile to my face. And why, like many, I'll keep turning back to these cultural reference points from the past time and time again.
