Why do we miss 2016? Nostalgia has a new rhythm

That 2016 would begin to exert its power over pop culture once again was easy to predict. The first signs of its return appeared as early as the end of 2025, with King Kylie (Kylie Jenner’s alter ego when she had blue hair) and the drop of her first single Fourth Strike, the virality of a yellow social media filter actually called 2016, as well as the resurrection of Tumblr aesthetics and trashcore by contemporary artists such as Addison Rae, Timothée Chalamet, and Justin Bieber. Not to mention that, on the occasion of their tenth anniversary, TikTok has been witnessing for weeks the revival of hits like Anti by Rihanna, Views by Drake, Lemonade by Beyoncé, The Divine Feminine by Mac Miller, A Seat at the Table by Solange, Blonde by Frank Ocean, and many others.

Looking back at all the key events of 2016 - including the unfortunate deaths of David Bowie and George Michael, along with the first presidential election of Donald Trump - it becomes fairly clear why the year is considered iconic, but that still doesn’t explain why it has managed to come back into fashion so quickly. According to the Laver Law, trends need at least twenty years to come back into style, a theory that has proven true for almost a century (we all remember when ’90s trends came back at the beginning of the 2010s), but this time it doesn’t hold up. Within the large and complex mechanism that is the fashion system, something has changed and has accelerated its pace.

The moment when the return of 2016 started to make sense again has arrived now, as Instagram has been flooded with photographic throwbacks from that era. Among Retrica selfies and countless outfit pics featuring skinny jeans, Jeffrey Campbell shoes, and Brandy Melville t-shirts, all the nostalgia of the time resurfaced. After all, despite the ill-fated first presidential election of Trump and the arrival of Brexit, things felt good. At least, they felt good online: the algorithm had not yet asserted its hegemony over our feeds, our screens were not under siege by dramatic news (even though there was plenty of it - from heavy blows to LGBTQIA+ rights dealt by the US government to terrorist attacks flaring up across Europe), trends were fewer and had a more generous expiration date.

More than Snapchat, adidas Superstars, or the Pumpkin Spice Latte, perhaps what we miss most about 2016 is the awareness we had regarding our consumption. Today it’s impossible to keep up with every trend, with every new release: we live on digital pages that constantly provide new input, new products to buy, new fashions to invest in - a mechanism that is ruining our attention span and perhaps even our personal taste. Of this 2016 that we now find on our phones, then, all we can do is let go of a bit of nostalgia and try to regain some autonomy. The kind that, ten years ago, didn’t even know what it meant to be cringe.