For years now, I've been unable to shake the feeling that we're stuck in a cultural time loop — no matter how many times I hear the word "unprecedented".
Hollywood is feverishly churning out prequels, sequels and reboots like it's a new category at the Oscars.
Fashion is currently a soup of looks borrowed from the decade between 2002 and 2012, which by any standard is an unsettlingly recent chapter to be taking inspiration from.
Like it or not, in 2022 we're swamped by nostalgia. Although, odds are, you do like it. More on that later.
On a good day, our cultural landscape scans like a familiar, pleasant dream — the kind you wake up from and instantly want to return to — although it's possible we now have the opposite problem; that we can't seem to wake up from it at all.
Indie sleaze is dead, long live indie sleaze
One of the looks that has resurfaced after a surprisingly short stint in the closet is "indie sleaze" — a cultural era generally understood to have extended from the mid-aughts to 2012.
Although even if you were there the first time, you probably didn't call it that.
That's because indie sleaze is only now being named and historicised, thanks to the fact that we're finally far enough away to be able to do that. Just.
A popular Instagram account by the same name declares in its bio that it's dedicated to "documenting the decadence of the indie sleaze party scene that died in 2012".
That scene has a lot to do with the high flash, messy, club-style photography featured on the account, and the hedonistic abandon of its subjects.
Its admin, Olivia, says the denizens of the indie sleaze era were obsessed, unsurprisingly, with all things indie — DIY venues, indie-alternative music, and grungy, mash-up, op-shop aesthetics.
"People were breaking the rules of fashion and being very provocative in how they dressed, or if someone thought what they were wearing was ugly, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing because it elicited a reaction," she says.
The era coincided with the dawn of "Web2.0", including the first iterations of social media, and the explosion of peer-to-peer streaming sites like Napster and LimeWire, which upended the music industry and heralded the arrival of a new indie wave.
Artists like Justice, LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, Cut Copy, Pnau, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes provided the soundtrack to the party.
Olivia sees the return of indie sleaze, both the look and the ethos, as a reaction to the pandemic.
"I get tagged in so many images every day from young people that have gone out and bought a digital point and shoot camera off eBay or a second-hand shop, and they're trying to replicate the aesthetics of this time," she says.
"It's a sense of uncertainty about the future … during the pandemic people were really feeding into their nostalgia because we felt very stuck".
Why are trend cycles speeding up?
It normally takes longer than a decade for trends to bounce back, but indie sleaze is just the latest case study in an established pattern of faster trend cycles in fashion.
Y2K, in all its strappy, sexy, futuristic glory, is another.
Thanks to fast fashion houses and the high octane social media ecosystem, trends are getting tired and being replaced much sooner now.
"We get a trend as soon as it debuts, whether it's on the runway, whether it's on the street somewhere," Vogue content editor Gladys Lai says. "And because of that, the trend spreads quickly and becomes obsolete really quickly."
The problem of breakneck trend cycles predates the pandemic, but that's only part of the picture.
The other part is why we're reaching specifically for pre-pandemic party nostalgia.
"Fashion doesn't exist in a vacuum," Gladys says. "It's always going to be a reflection of how we're feeling … and I don't think it's that much of a stretch to wonder if we're dressing for a period before all of this happened".
Nostalgia: bigger than fashion, older than the pandemic
Read the news and it's not hard to understand why we're in the mood for nostalgia, and not just when we get dressed.
"In times where you can't control your external environment, you try to control your internal environment … you might reach for the more accessible, easy to process rom-com than a new indie film," says Sarah Owen, a trend forecaster from Soon Future Studies.
At the same time, evidence in screen culture of what she calls "The Creativity Crisis" predates the turmoil of the last few years.
"Eight of the top 10 highest grossing movies in 2015 were prequels or sequels or something of that nature," Sarah says.
It's a difficult pattern to break when cultural power brokers, either in fashion, film or elsewhere, have a more sophisticated understanding of their audience than ever before.
"We've got so much more data than we ever have had before that allows us to know what's going to do well," Sarah says.
"We're reaching that level of peak optimisation where I don't know how much further it can go.
"I think a lot of these big players have just relied on [that] to create the next best trending output, and I think that's going to have a big backlash in the future."
Perhaps, but nostalgia isn't going anywhere fast — at least, not as long as we keep choosing it.
Ange Lavoipierre is an award-winning journalist, writer, and comedian. She's the host and EP of the ABC’s new culture podcast, Schmeitgeist.
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