Gen Z is reliving my youth. I’m scared to point out why they’re wrong

I just know my mother is saying “I told you so”.

She spent much of the early 2000s watching my sisters and I hand-sew panels into our straight-leg jeans to turn them into flares, search Big W for flowy paisley tops and borrow Beatles CDs from the library to transfer onto our iPods. With each passing fascination that felt entirely new and fresh to us, she’d roll her eyes or laugh, and tell us she’d been there for the trend the first time around – and that one day we’d see our era of fashion return.

Credit: Dionne Gain

It felt inconceivable to me then. No one would be clamouring for the neon T-shirts printed with puns in massive block text like the ones we bought from Supré. The songs on Top 40 radio seemed so fleeting and ephemeral – none of those could possibly last.

You know where this is going, of course.

I didn’t begin to feel my age when I bought eye cream or experienced my first two-day hangover or skipped a party with an open bar to stay in and do a jigsaw puzzle the same way I felt it when I first saw micro brows and skinny jeans make their return.

We thought we’d all moved on. Women my age whispered in fear – “Are we going to have to do it again? I just got my brows tattooed on!”

But what we failed to consider was that “we” would not be participating in the trend revival. That was a luxury reserved for those not alive to witness Y2K. The ones with no baggage attached to names like Ed Hardy and Von Dutch. People who only knew Paris Hilton as a DJ and the Olsen twins as fashion designers.

Recently, while scrolling TikTok, I got an insight into a highly specific niche of Gen Z nostalgia. In a series of montages, some kids were expressing sentimental yearning not for a vague “era” of life in the 2000s, but for the year 2014 specifically.

You know, 2014. The year that One Direction was touring the world, and Tumblr was the dominant social platform for introverted, big-hearted teens. The year when the only dispatches we got direct from celebrities was via their participation in the Ice Bucket Challenge.

When I experienced the “’90s-does-’70s” trends, it was with the ignorance of the preceding generation. I got the highlights reel, the CliffsNotes. This time, I’d been there for the inception of the nostalgia so I could see how skewed Gen Z’s perception of 2014 was. I felt compelled to correct them, to let them know I understood the impulse to get emo but that actually they didn’t have it quite right. Thank god I resisted – I’m not cut out to handle the bullying that would’ve inevitably come my way!

The odd thing about homing in on something as niche as 2014 is that it was as highly documented as any other year since the invention of the internet. We were posting our way through it. All the information is still there, blogged over and tweeted about, for anyone interested in seeking it out.

One of the cultural products from the mid-2010s that’s found a new generation of fans in Gen Z viewers is Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls. Her contentious public reputation was so noisy that, for many years, young people didn’t bother to pay her groundbreaking series any mind, assuming it was the vanity project of a cancelled egomaniac.

In many ways, it was the urtext for cringe narcissism storylines by and about privileged white kids. From the moment it premiered in 2012, Girls inspired endless articles about what it did right and got wrong. About why it was problematic and how it was misunderstood. About whether or not Dunham really was the voice of her generation.

More than a decade later, as attempts to copy the Girls formula have emerged and floundered, its distinct quality has only been cast into sharper relief. The enduring appeal is not for “2012” as a vague concept, but of Dunham’s depiction of flailing young adulthood, dicey friendships between people who maybe don’t actually like each other all that much, and a city that you force yourself to live in because you believe it will make you a different/better/cooler person.

Unlike eyebrow shapes and jean waistbands and guitar bands, those things are truly timeless.

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