We Didn’t Grow Up in the 90s. We Just Wished We Had.

We didn’t grow up in the 90s; we just grew up wishing we did, and there’s a difference. We’ve been calling it nostalgia, but can we really miss something we weren’t there for?

I love the whole 80s/90s/2000s aesthetic. And if my TikTok For You Page is anything to go by, so do most of Gen Z.

Extreme low-rise jeans that you cannot sit down in. Juicy Couture velour tracksuits. Disposable cameras with the flash permanently stuck on. I own it all, including a Von Dutch trucker cap. Not proud, not sorry.

It’s never felt like real nostalgia. It feels like homesickness for a place we’ve never been. My mum would cringe every time I called it “my aesthetic”. Turns out she was watching her kid LARP her actual childhood, badly, in a fast-fashion knockoff.

TikTok’s decided the 2020s are “Gen Alpha’s 80s,” and the 2010s, my childhood, is fair game too. Even CNBC has clocked the 2016 nostalgia wave.

Watching a ten-year-old recreate my Musical.ly era hit different once I realised I was the artefact. I finally get it. Sorry, Mum.

Nostalgia is the feeling of missing something you lived through. Gen Z are missing something we’ve only ever seen through a Pinterest filter, which is not the same thing.

Even brands have clocked us, 77% of Gen Z admit they like it when brands revive old aesthetics, lived through or not.

My mum donated her original tracksuit to the op-shop for free. Someone just paid $150 for the same one on Depop. That’s not nostalgia, that’s a supply chain…

You can’t really miss something you were never there for. You can only want it, loudly, on a mood board. We’ve been labelling it all wrong. Turns out there’s already a correct word for it, anemoia: nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually known.

My Take? We need to stop calling it nostalgia. It’s anemoia, the same kind of ironic longing, just correctly labelled at a worse exchange rate.