\nThe ‘80s nostalgia has hung on for a weirdly long time if you look at the typical generational nostalgia cycle. That '70s Show ran '98-2006, capturing a 25-34 demo pining for a time they narrowly missed out on experiencing firsthand - that tracks, but then why was the '80s wave cresting new heights a decade later, with the release of season 1 of Stranger Things, instead of petering out? (As era-defining as that show has come to be, it’s hardly era-delimiting; it rode the tail end of the trend.)
You could chalk it up to those indelible '80s aesthetics, both in music and cinema. It’s not just that it’s quality entertainment - the marketing success of a product is often determined by the strength of its brand, and the reactionary atmosphere of the '80s produced a remarkably homogeneous body of work, one that with its easy recognisability and replicability in effect comes pre-branded. (The '70s, in contrast, defined by their excess, can be harder to present in a digestible package.) You could also blame it on a subconscious desire, even among liberal Netflix-watchers, for the comfort of reaction itself - “Morning Again in America” again, another Reagan landslide.
But in a sense what I’m more interested in is this: why did we skip over the '90s? I’ve already alluded to the '70s wave, which also includes Pulp Fiction; '60s nostalgia is such a thing that it’s become its own established part of American culture; '50s nostalgia in the '70s gave us Happy Days, and so on. Yet the returning trends in fashion aren’t 1995, they’re 2003. '99, '98 at the earliest, if The Matrix and the “No Scrubs” video are given their proper due as seminal works. Most of the decade - grunge, anyone? College radio alt-rock? - got entirely skipped over; the early-'90s nostalgia wave pretty much starts and ends with that one Cardi B and Bruno Mars video. It never went anywhere.
Kind of tempting to chalk it up to “no one wants the '90s back” but these aren’t hard and fast patterns and there are definitely other factors in play. At the same time, it sure seems like no one wants the fucking '90s back.
Remember how a thing about Dawson’s Creek (by Kevin Williamson, the Scream guy) is not only did they all speak quick and thesaurusily like 90s hip movie dialogue*, but that Dawson Leery wanted to be a film director and his personal icon was Steven Spielberg specifically because he reunited the post-60s culture by inventing the tentpole blockbuster about being an 80s kid whose parents didn’t stick together?
* see also Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars. Huh, I only now notice how female-marked those are. I was more female-marked at the time.
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