Wonder Years ▷▷ The Idle Man

... Fast forward to today and it's like we're ironically trying to press the rewind button on technology (and ourselves..?) to turn back the film back to the days of the VCR. Now, when you look at the history of the movement of social currents, art and culture, latter ideologies as trends often come as a response to a former wave. Like Minimalism was a response to Abstract Expressionism and the hippie movement a rebuttal of 1960s institutionalization and war.

So when you place the current obsession with the analog vis-a-vis the former wave of opulence and hyper-realism, the relativity of these ideas on the spectrum may explain the birth of the obsession with the past. For with hyper-realism, we experienced such real magnification of our modern lives with all its consumerism, technology and excess, that perhaps it made us realise that postmodern 21st century living was not all it was cut out to be. With the omniscient access to information, the prevalence of the screen and the indexing of human relationships and even humans themselves through social media, our knee-jerk reaction was to jump headstrong back in the opposite direction, where we could - in fashion, music and art.

Or even so that for all the hyper-realistic immortalisation of our selves and our experiences in pictures and moving pictures, we could still never hold onto moments. Humans have a tendency to long for what they can't have or what's been lost, and in this way, we will always romanticise the past. That is why dressing like I'm from the 1990s is so much more than a purely aesthetic choice. It represents an innate obsession with the past in a longing for a time for greater connection to one another with more palpable realness, and a yearning for simpler human pleasures in an altogether more complicated digital world. And these ideas are pushed into the forefront as the 1990s kids of today are bursting into adulthood as cultural leaders.