Is this the 20s or 1999? Every morning when I take my daughter to daycare, we pass the neighborhood teens waiting for the school bus. They wear loose fit Levis, white Nikes, and draping sweatshirts a size too big. And for a second I’m back in high school starting my own fashion voyage with clothes just like them: knockoff JNCO jeans, RUN DMC Adidas, and some boxy button-down in a garish patten. The kids I pass in the morning would look at home in my yearbook (2003). And knowing their penchant for nostalgia, maybe they would sort of enjoy that.
Lately, my social media has been feeding me clips that look a lot like the videos I made as an AV geek in the early 2000s. Shot on a VHS, they’re sort of washed out, people wave at the camera a lot. There is too much zooming. The audience—based on the comments—is a mix of elder (or “geriatric”) millennials, like me, recognizing a favorite old binder or t shirt and Gen Zers romanticizing the era’s vibes. Many of the videos (seemingly created by teens) are edited with music that doesn’t exactly match the era and are covered with over-the-top period-inspired graphics. Others feel like they’re aimed at millennials and use some of the most nostalgia-soaked tunes from the time that are basically made for graduation videos.
One commenter writes, “Born to be an emo/scene teenager in 2005 Forced to be a teenager in 2024.”
Another writes, “It’s so nostalgic and I wasn’t even born yet.”
Another: “Help, why is this kind of what my school looks like?”
Some viewers point out that no one is on their phone. I see that comment a lot. The idea that only one person would have a camera on them feels novel, even for those of us who spent most of our lives in a pre-smartphone world. Some viewers wish they could go back to that time and ditch their phones.
I get that. “I need to spend less time on my phone” is the new “I should work out more.” Everybody says it, usually with little intention of ever doing anything about it. Still, it’s a nice thought, and reminiscing over videos from the beforetime can feel sort of magical. But as someone who experienced those years at life’s most awkward ages, it also conjures a lot I’d rather forget.
When I noticed the kids at the bus stop, I had flashbacks to being fourteen—maybe the fist time I was aware of making a fashion choice. It was one that felt entwined with presenting a persona to the world. My tastes were incoherent. I obsessed over the boxes of my dad’s old clothes I found in the attic. Think polyester bell bottoms and flowered shirts with butterfly collars. I wanted to wear it all, head-to-toe—but also desperately wanted to look like I was on Dawson’s Creek, or maybe like I was in Blink 182, or maybe Nirvana, or maybe I should bleach my hair like Eminem, I thought. I was a sucker for a good Gap advertisement, too. I owned at least one vest, an article I felt was an especially bold fashion choice. If I was presenting an image to the world, I’m not sure what it was, aside from a kid who just liked to play dress-up. A friend who had seen too many 90s teen comedies, once tried to explain to me all the cliques at his school. “You don’t really fit in to any of them,” he said, but then added, “Actually, you might be a freak or a geek. Have you seen that show?” I had.
Maybe that’s why I was less than thrilled to see some of those styles making a comeback. These were the clothes I felt most self-conscious in. It probably didn’t help that this coincided with my 40th birthday, opening a portal to a whole other kind of insecurity. The feeling of being too young and clueless meets the feeling of being too old and out-of-touch. The two felt eerily similar.
Most of all, the return of these styles meant that I was now part of someone else’s nostalgia. What felt like a not-so-distant past to me was, in fact, a chapter in a high schooler’s history book. Nostalgia always represented a passing of time, but to me that meant traveling back in time. But now I found myself on the other side—instead, finding someone else looking back at me.
So I did what poorly aged 90s movies taught me you do in the face of aging: I bought some dumb shit. I started spending a lot of time on eBay and other resale apps searching for my current vintage obsessions: a 1980s Pittsburgh Pirates jacket, accessories for a 70s Canon rangefinder, vintage flash bulbs for a Polaroid folding camera, early 90s Simpsons t-shirts. The list goes on. I indulged my inner geek. I avoided 2024 and instead looked for a connection to times I could barely remember and to times I never knew.
Like the kids wearing the styles of my adolescence, my own nostalgia pre-dates my life. Some extend into my life—usually the first five years or so.
Every generation feels that kind of nostalgia for times before them or for times they can’t quite remember. At least I think they do. I can recall my siblings and I going through a phase of obsessing over disco and sitcoms of the 70s. It’s sort of a version of FOMO, or in this case a Fear Of Having Missed Out (FOHMO?). “If only I could have been alive to experience that,” we think. But like everyone who was alive to experience it, we wouldn’t have appreciated it either. Because it was just the style at the time, and as humans, we’re incapable of living in the moment. By the time our senses reach our brains, we’re already perceiving the past. So we’re left trying to reconcile our forward moving bodies with our backwards looking minds.
Our phones cater to the latter.
One of the joys of the internet age is the ease with which you can find the ephemera of the past. Without it, how would Gen Z discover the enlightened pre-smart phone era? It would be hard. Which is to say they’d have to find the past the old-fashioned way—by catching reruns on Nick at Nite, browsing dusty magazines and J. Crew catalogs, and rewatching stacks of their family’s VHS tapes. Somebody is still doing that work, but they’re also uploading it to the internet for anyone to find. And with the help of an algorithm, a nostalgia-curious wanderer could encounter all of that within a minute of scrolling.
The Preppy Handbook was the closest thing to this in pre-internet times. And even if it was meant to be tongue in cheek, plenty took it literally and menswear types still reference it today. But unlike the handbook, which served as not just a guide for how to dress but also how to act like a monied elite, style nostalgia is less about fitting into a past culture and more about gathering ancient artifacts to remix into something contemporary.
Since finding that box of my dad’s old clothes as a teenager, I’ve obsessed over all things vintage: clothes, technology, furniture. And it seems to have only intensified with age. Like my scattered taste as a fourteen year old, I still love seeing the merging of past and present and the melding of disparate styles.
So, while I cringe at the return of early 2000s fashion, I’m honored, really. And relieved. Honored to become nostalgia—and relieved that another generation is looking back and blurring the style boundaries that we thought actually meant something.
At the time of writing this, my daughter is fifteen months old, and it’s impossible to predict what fashion she’ll like when she’s a teenager. Maybe it’ll be what we’re wearing now…which, you know, is what we were wearing twenty years ago. Or maybe styles will stick around in little pockets of culture just waiting for their moment in the sun again. Maybe fashion cycles will reach a speed at which no trend ever really gets a chance to stick, and instead all styles coexist with varying degrees of visibility. Maybe butterfly collars, JNCO jeans, and laceless Adidas will be the look. Could it be that my teenage daughter will one day help me realize that my teenage style was just ahead of its time? Probably not.
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Jason "Jay" Sepac is an essayist and visual artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His visual essays and nonfiction have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Normal School, and others. One essay, “Watch This,” was a finalist for the 2021 Fourth Genre Multimedia Essay contest, judged by Kristen Radtke. His artwork has also appeared on the cover of The Iowa Review. He is currently developing a collection of linked visual essays that considers nostalgia and how it intersects with the image-based technology of particular eras (Polaroids, Super 8 Film, VHS, early cinema, etc.). He earned an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University, where he also currently teaches.
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