It always seems to be some piece of clothing that sets off the panic—a sartorial flashback that reminds us how our teenage memories are being mined for a revival. We expected it, of course, but not quite so soon. For Amelie Gillette, the Onion‘s Hater, it was American Apparel’s homage to Generra’s thermochromatic Hypercolor shirt. For other observers it’s been kids rocking Cross Colours hip-hop gear. But for me it was a pair of Reebok Pumps on the shelf at Saint Alfred. I still vividly remember the Pump’s introduction amid a boom in sneaker-technology advancement, the unfulfilled lust it engendered in me and thousands of other middle school boys with sane footwear budgets—and the realization not too long after the shoes hit the market that they were in fact hideous, especially the bulbous rubber half-basketballs you used to inflate the tongues for that custom-fit feel.
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Like other flavors of pop culture nostalgia, the 90s revival is driven by the twin engines of fashion and music. It’s not too wild a guess that the fashion victims sporting Cross Colours might be into the Cool Kids—who unabashedly worship old-school hip-hop acts like EPMD—or that the ones breaking out the Day-Glo T-shirts and leggings are following the lead of the British nu-rave scene. These two fickle fields have been aiding and abetting each other’s backward-looking tendencies for a while now. After rock bloated to dinosaur size in the early 70s (with pant-leg widths expanding accordingly), the late 70s and early 80s brought a return to the scrappy 50s and early 60s. The 90s reintroduced the hippie to pop culture, to no small amount of notice in rags like Rolling Stone, and then went ahead and reclaimed the 70s as well, first with shag rockers like Urge Overkill and then Sabbath-worshipping stoner rock from the likes of Kyuss. (I’m just skimming the surface, of course—let’s not even get into third-wave ska or the second garage revival or the No Depression movement or neosoul.) And of course a few years ago the next wave of kids who wished they’d been there back when started fetishizing the first decade in which I was actually cognizant of music: the 1980s.
No, I think what’s making people like me tense is the inevitability of the 90s revival, and the feeling that we’re speeding down the track to a point where nothing can happen without immediately getting recycled. When was the last time you listened to “House of Jealous Lovers”? I dropped it in a mix the other day and I swear I could see a little sparkle in the eyes of everyone on the dance floor, like everyone was already thinking how great it would be to bring back 2002.
We’ve been treating retro movements like we’ve been treating global oil reserves—recklessly consuming them with some sort of vague idea that they’ll last forever.
