This week I became briefly obsessed with watching 90s camcorder footage of people walking around New York City.
Not documentaries. Not retrospectives on how the city has changed. Just people, walking around.
YouTube, it turns out, is full of this stuff. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of videos documenting otherwise unremarkable days in the city.
Suits crossing Midtown. Joggers in Central Park. A windy ride on the Staten Island Ferry. A slow drift through the East Village.
Nothing really happens in these videos. People buy newspapers, wait for the light, hail cabs, eat lunch on a bench.
Nobody is staring down into a 6-inch rectangle of glowing glass.
That absence is jarring. It not only changes the posture of every person on the street. It also anchors everyone entirely in the physical world, because there’s nowhere else to go.
Part of the appeal is anthropological—taking in the storefronts, the clothes, the lost architecture.
But I realized I wasn’t really watching to see what New York looked like. I was watching to see what unmediated presence felt like.
This particular strain of throwback content is, admittedly, niche. But the impulse behind it is hardly isolated.
We tend to talk about nostalgia as a trend. But at this point, it feels more like a permanent condition.
Nostalgia has become an ambient layer running underneath everything, across every category at once. Our fashion is nostalgic. Our food choices are nostalgic. Music, packaging, interfaces all borrow from the visual language of the past.
I call it perma-nostalgia: the past is no longer somewhere we occasionally retreat to. It’s become part of the texture of the present.
The evidence is everywhere:
Vinyl is selling better than it has since the ‘80s. Pop’s biggest hits are built on interpolations of songs its listeners are too young to remember firsthand. Snack brands are reissuing the exact packaging their buyers ate off of as kids. Scratched-up digital cameras and flip phones are selling like hotcakes on resale marketplaces.
So why exactly does the past feel quite so irresistible right now?
Nostalgia tends to become most powerful when the future stops feeling like an upgrade.
For much of modern consumer culture, aspiration pointed forward. The next version would be better. The next technology would make life easier. The next generation would be more prosperous than the one before it.
That bargain feels shakier now.
We’re living through extraordinary technological acceleration at the same time that many of the basic markers of progress—owning a home, raising a family comfortably, achieving financial security—feel increasingly out of reach.
The future may be arriving faster than ever. That doesn’t mean people believe their lives will get better when it does.
And when the future stops being where you project your aspirations, the past becomes a very compelling place to put them.
But there is no single past we’re all reaching for.
Nostalgia may be everywhere, but it isn’t one big cultural phenomenon so much as thousands of smaller ones, each organized around a different version of what was lost—or what we imagine was.
And around those different versions of the past, communities form.
There are Y2K obsessives cataloging the design language of early-2000s technology.
Archive fashion accounts dissecting 1996 Helmut Lang runway shows down to the cut of a jacket.
Disney adults collecting maps and ephemera from the parks they remember as kids, and sneaker collectors treating original Jordan colorways like cultural artifacts.
These communities aren’t simply reminiscing. They’re reconstructing—digging up, cataloging and reanimating hyper-specific fragments of the past.
And wherever cultural energy gathers, brands inevitably follow.
The problem is that you can reproduce the codes of nostalgia almost perfectly without understanding what people are actually attached to.
Because it’s never just the object. It’s what the object represents.
The flip phone isn’t just a flip phone. It’s an internet that felt smaller and weirder. The mall isn’t just the mall. It’s a Saturday afternoon with nowhere else to be. The disposable camera isn’t just the grain. It’s taking a photograph you wouldn’t see until later.
And those old videos of New York aren’t really about old New York. They’re about a city that feels grittier, cheaper, less optimized. A version of life that seems to have moved at a different speed.
Which is why cultural appetite for a particular era doesn’t automatically give every brand permission to participate in it.
Consider Gap. Its latest campaign with Hailey Bieber is built entirely around 1996, the year she was born. And it works because Gap has unusual permission to play there.
The brand didn’t just reference that world. It helped build it.
Its old campaigns, denim, logo and stores aren’t props from the ‘90s. They’re part of how people remember the decade. When Gap reaches into its archive, it’s pulling from a cultural history it actually participated in.
Now imagine a brand founded in 2015 staging the same tribute to 1996—it could get every detail right and still feel completely wrong.
One brand is reaching into its own history. The other is borrowing someone else’s.
That’s the difference between nostalgia as aesthetic and nostalgia as an expression of belonging—and it’s why understanding the communities carrying these memories forward matters so much.
They know which details are sacred, which references ring true, and more importantly, what feeling they’re trying to keep alive.
For brands, that means starting with the community, not the decade.
A mood board can tell you what an era looked like. A community can tell you what it meant—and why people are reaching for it again now.
That’s the part you can’t fake with the right font, soundtrack or archival reference.
Understand what they find worth preserving from that past—and whether your brand has a meaningful role in carrying it forward.
Until next time,
Sara