The past is everywhere. Brand campaigns reenact history, vintage clothing is continuing to surge, as is a prevailing belief among all demographics that now is worse, despite all evidence to the contrary. Most predominant trends, from the Mobwife aesthetic to coquette core to Y2K indicate a yearning for different times–perhaps those perceived as simpler, more singular, less overwhelming. The seduction of the past no longer seems to adhere to a trend cycle timeline. We can’t help but wonder about nostalgia as a heightened contemporary condition.

In a recent Instagram post, Hannah Fry explains a mantra that (she claims) has been scientifically proven to improve your happiness. Hedonic adaptation is the cyclical human response to positive stimuli in which, after a brief spike in happiness (due to, say, a promotion), one eventually returns to a baseline level of happiness. In other words, the psychological good of a positive change in one’s life doesn’t have a lasting impact on one’s happiness. So, Fry says, we need to find ways to improve our baseline happiness level, and the mantra she says has been proven to improve that baseline is: “These are the good days.” In its repetition, we place emphasis on the now to improve our experience of the present.

The idea that “these are the good days” implores us to take responsibility for the here and now. One risk of nostalgia, particularly in a challenging social, political and economic landscape, is that it can be inherently disempowering in its comfort and passivity. It is easy to read about the culture-defining social scenes born of the New York’s restaurants and experience a melancholy longing for a past that, when narrativized through the lens of media or memoir, feels impossibly exciting and glamorous compared with what is on offer today. Our parents’ nostalgia tended to be about the good-old-days of their own youth, but increasingly, our nostalgia stretches to include times we never even knew. Or indeed, with the advent of AI tools, never even existed. (You see, we can even be nostalgic about how much better nostalgia used to be). To sink too deeply into that sense of longing for the past creates a powerful and dangerous inertia: “everything was so much better before”. Those were the good days, and no matter how much 90s Gucci you scroll through, you can’t go back. Nostalgia serves social media platforms well because it is a passive, absorbent practice–it helps to keep us glued to our devices, reminiscing about a time we can only (try to) access through consumption. Part of nostalgia’s sickly appeal is that it can abdicate us of what, at times, feels like an overwhelming responsibility to engage proactively and creatively with our lives, to make the world around us into the place we want it to be.

Exercising caution about nostalgia does not mean disqualifying the past. There is a fine line between inspiration and nostalgic over-referentiality. To take inspiration from the past is a natural part of a brand’s evolution toward a potential future–to understand the histories with which a brand wants to experiment is vital to developing a perspective as a brand, as for a person. It is a critical part of soul-seeking. Simone Rocha is a wonderful example of using the past to create newness. Using traditionally feminine symbolism, Rocha stretches meanings to the contemporary. In Rachel Tashjian’s words: “In her hands, the bow is no mere adornment. It is a way to gather fabric and a way to reveal the nude skin underneath, pulling between modesty and lasciviousness. It is the cinch of a bungee cord that tightens a functional field jacket in the palest, saccharine pink.” The past becomes a set of tools, a set of understandings, or a set of conventions to undermine, reinterpret or build upon. To understand a past, recognize its connection to one’s current moment and even future is to circumvent the trappings of nostalgia–the potentially retrogressive force that threatens us with its convenience.

We are skeptical of nostalgia when it is the driving force behind a brand. Nostalgia is a potentially cannibalizing endeavor, and we are more susceptible to it than ever before in our possessing simplified access to an unprecedented scale of archival material. While history is the first ingredient of the future, nostalgia can stupefy. We need to ask the right questions of the past to find new ways forward. Instead of longing for what once was, we must search for what excites us about today and the things we have never seen before. After all: these are the good days. 

Aidan Larned (Strategist) and Michael Whitham (Creative)