Times of instability and crisis produce increased nostalgia for the past. We long for a time that no longer exists, or never existed. Like melancholy, nostalgia is a sentiment of loss – one that’s particularly familiar to us today – for an imagined way of life that has disappeared.
It is, as Svetlana Boym put it in The Future of Nostalgia, "a romance with one’s own fantasy".
Nostalgia is central to fashion. Every season, the fashion industry reaches into the archives with cyclical predictability, echoing historical trends and stimulating nostalgic feelings through marketing that makes the consumer "miss things that never were".
At the same time, fashion reflects present culture, mirroring the social imagining of the moment.
One recent trend to cycle through this system – and stick – are "mom jeans".