The Melting Pot of Cultures Across Decades: How GenZ is Bending Time

The internet is enabling people to not just travel across space, but through time. The world of digital natives has become a melting pot of cultures across decades. Behind this time-travel are a yearning for comfort, an experiment in aesthetics and a journey of self-exploration.

Photo by Andrea Riondino on Unsplash

One of the episodes in the latest season of Netflix’s “Next in Fashion” is called “Everything Old is New”. It featured a challenge that got designers to recreate the defining fashion from past decades but add a contemporary twist to it. To me, this episode felt like the perfect metaphor for the lives of GenZ today. They are digital natives inspired by the past. And their reality today is a heady concoction of analogue and digital.

The evidence is everywhere. Pantone’s shade “Very Peri” from last year, and this year’s “Viva Magenta” travel between the digital and physical worlds, mirroring the lives of GenZ. Today, young people want to date a friend and meet them organically like in the old times. Not go out with strangers they meet on a website. And yet, they are also willing to send their virtual avatars on the first few dates. Corsets, wired headphones, Y2K Fashion, and typewriters are back in new and old forms.

Back in 2017, I’d written an article about how young people are getting drawn to nostalgia. My theory was that the fast digitization of the world was pushing young people towards the familiar, making them nostalgic for simpler times. We were then talking about Millennials — the generation that remembers a world before digital technology. GenZ is the first generation that has never seen this world. So, the guiding emotion that shapes their tastes goes beyond nostalgia. It’s Anemoia.

Anemoia is defined as “A nostalgic sense of longing for a past you yourself have never lived. It is nostalgia for the “good ol’ days”; more specifically, the good ol’ days you are too young to have known.” In a constantly changing world that leaves us feeling overwhelmed with uncertainties, an image of an idyllic past becomes our escape.

But with this emotion, comes the often-inaccurate glorification of the past, sometimes accompanied by a problematic turning back of the clock on progress. For example, the tradwife movement, which embraces a 1950s housewife ideal, is gaining popularity on TikTok. Corsets, which were used among women in the 18th century, have faced criticism about their impact on women’s health for the last 2 centuries. Not so long ago, Emma Watson, a vocal feminist, had refused to wear a corset for her role in Beauty & the Beast. Six years later, corsets are ubiquitous on runways everywhere.

The comeback of old ideas has been explained as the desire to return to simpler times. The past seems more comforting than an unpredictable future. According to a VICE study among GenZ audiences, 66% say they’d prefer to travel 30 years back in time to experience the world before the internet vs. 34% who would choose to go 30 years in the future to experience a fully operational metaverse.

Another way to look at this is to understand the widespread aestheticization of our reality today. What if we were to think of every decade in the past as an aesthetic? Recent period dramas and films like Bridgerton, Enola Holmes, and the latest version of Persuasion, are an accurate representation of the aesthetic of the times, not necessarily the social dynamics.

An aesthetic is no longer just about the way something looks. Aesthetics have become the medium for people to find and express their sense of self and identity. 1950s Suburbia, 80s Ballroom, and Modernism are not just moments in time. They are aesthetics that come from a certain outlook toward life, which was prevalent during the time. Perhaps young people today are exploring these aesthetics to find where they belong. To explore the multiple facets of their identities, with some anachronistic results, such as #coastalgrandma and the #grandmillennial.

The internet is bending time. And GenZ is curating its identity by foraging for cultural products across the timeline. A journey through time is a journey of self-exploration in a world where it’s easy to feel lost. It’s a journey towards a predictable and simplified version of the past, which feels familiar in the face of a complicated present and an unpredictable future.