IN DEFENSE OF NOSTALGIA

THE FALL/WINTER 2024 COLLECTIONS SAW MANY DESIGNERS PAY HOMAGE TO THE PAST. SARAH MOWER REFLECTS ON WHY WE'RE IN A CYCLE OF LOOKING BACK AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR FASHION NOW.

By Sarah Mower

Nostalgia. What a highly contentious word that is—a sentimental backward-looking through rose-tinted glasses, the urge to wrap ourselves up in some psychologically comforting aspect of the past. Mention it around fashion, and you’ll immediately provoke a whole school of adverse reactions. Nostalgia is naughty! It’s a bad, weak-minded, and retrograde thing. A prime offense against the everything-must-be-newness that drives fashion relentlessly onwards. Nostalgia goes right against the implicit fashion law that to embrace what’s now and so-called relevant must mean instantly forgetting what you did or liked last season, last month—or five minutes ago. But surely this can’t be right either.

In fashion—as in life—we’re caught between the pressure to speed-forget and the need to preserve the memories and emotions we want to treasure. So are designers. We’ve seen this play out in a pronounced way across fashion recently. In the Fall/Winter 2024 season alone, there have been anniversaries, abrupt departures and in-comings, extended re-examinations of history, reflections on designers’ personal lives, and brands aiming to convince us that what is new is also fundamentally timeless. Ultimately, I think it’s a tussle over what makes us human, and how we respond to what human creativity makes of the anxious time we’re living in.

Whether we stick to opposing it in principle or not, the fact is that we’re in a generalized cycle where fashion is looking back. Examining that phenomenon in the indivisible context of history and politics tells us everything about where we are now. Fashion returns to referencing its past when times are hard. In climates of fear, economic uncertainty, strife, and horror, it looks to offer escape routes, fantasies, and reassurance. And when times are bright and opportunities are booming, it takes to futurism and carefree optimism, turning its back on the bad old days. History repeats and politics are mirrored, but fashion finds new forms to configure it every time. It’s been happening in step with cultural and political movements, and periods of war and peace, for the whole of the last century. In the terrible mid 2020s, it’s no surprise that we are where we are now.

Modernists, conceptualists, and progressives traditionally hate nostalgia—yet look across the fashion landscape at some of the most radical designers. The ones who receive the most accolades for their shows use their voices to go right against that grain. For a myriad of nuanced reasons, we’ve loved them for it.

There was the impact of John Galliano’s out-and-out reveling in the romantic history of the underbelly of Parisian nightlife, set somewhere in the 1910s or ’20s, in a fully-realized club scenario beneath the Pont Alexandre 111. It was a couture show for Maison Margiela, of course, but by general agreement, this monumental performance was more free rein than Galliano had been since his famed shows of the ’90s. It generated an overwhelming nostalgia for those who’d been there—but also spoke to young generations, connecting emotionally with people who were not even born yet.

Is it possible to have nostalgia for something you never experienced, and never thought could happen in your time? Galliano’s show said absolutely yes. The availability of vintage shows on YouTube has made avid fashion historians of a new generation. It debunks the idea that young people don’t know or care about the past and can be easily fobbed off with formulaic, watered-down, commercial imitations. Ideas that come from just-out-of-reach fashion memories have a huge psychological attraction to every generation. You can mathematically reckon on this nostalgia lag turning up 20 to 25 years after each cohort’s birth. It’s why Gen Z (born roughly around 2000) got so behind Y2K style—much to the bemusement of their elders.

Age-gap nostalgia is also a plausible explanation for why Alessandro Michele, born in 1972, had such a massively successful romance with the ’70s while he was at Gucci. He rechanneled that era—which he was too young to consciously participate in—and made it resonate with a vast global young audience. (We’ll see if he’ll take up that narrative at Valentino in September.) It could also account for the early-’70s inflections that Virginie Viard put into her Fall 2024 Chanel collection, with its huge sun hats with turned-back brims, slim maxi-coats, and David Bowie on the soundtrack. Her ostensible theme was Coco Chanel’s beginnings in Deauville, but Viard described designing the collection “at the crossroads of the ’70s and ’20s.” She was 10 years old at the beginning of the ’70s. Her nostalgia flowed lightly, convincingly, and to much applause.

But of course, Virginie Viard was also following in the footsteps of Karl Lagerfeld. He was famously one of the most fluently knowledgeable fashion historicists of all time, who came into his own in the early ’70s as in-house designer at Chloé. With his flowing crepe-de-chine dresses, Lagerfeld was a central mover in defining the first surge of retro fashion—ideas retrieved from ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s fashion—representing a new generation’s backlash to the Space Age minis of the ’60s. It was radical and shocking at the time. In Paris, Yves Saint Laurent caused a massive scandal with his Spring/Summer 1971 Liberation couture collection. With its bright green chubbies, turbans, printed crepe puff-sleeved dresses, and big-shouldered ’40s jackets, the show outraged establishment fashion journalists because it reminded them of the Occupation of Paris 30 years earlier. It was, however, only a couture version of the flea-market dresses Saint Laurent saw 22-year-old Paloma Picasso wearing around his studio. She’d bought them in London, where retro style was already raging amongst the likes of Ossie Clark, Biba, and Bowie, and glam rock was about to take off. If elders—the purists and angular modernists of 10 years earlier—loathed and objected to this glittery, backsliding nostalgia, then so much the better. Saint Laurent’s instinct for the right thing proved unstoppable—right up to today. Miuccia Prada herself has paid homage to that collection in the lips prints of her subversively bourgeois Spring 2000 collection, and subsequently.

Karl Lagerfeld’s influence showed up once again at Chemena Kamali’s debut for Chloé, where she scored another much-applauded show of the season. Kamali successfully fused her own memories of working for Chloé during the Phoebe Philo it-girl noughties, and an archive of photographs of Karl Lagerfeld’s ’70s and ’80s designs. It was images of the flouncy lace blouses and highwayman capes of Lagerfeld’s 1977 Musketeers collection that set Kamali off in a direction that swept the audience along with her. At the time, of course, Lagerfeld had been deftly referencing 17th-century French costume history.

If you’re going to relate something about the past, it needs to be authentic, personal, and real. Miuccia Prada made her Miu Miu collection into a kind of autobiography in clothes, brightly, wittily, and pragmatically summarizing the wardrobe memories of her 70-something years. You could read it so clearly: from the haute-classic-chic skirt suits, lady-coats, and pearls of the Milanese ’60s and ’70s, to Italian-cinematic little black dresses, to bejeweled references to her own past collections—through to short baby clothes. “I think they are classics. Everyone can choose from them to be a child or a lady,” she said pithily. “Every single morning, I decide if I’m going to be 15 years old, or a lady close to death.”

The fear about nostalgia is that it might be an essentially conservative force—a channeling of illusory versions of the good old days. Before his final show at Valentino, Pier Paulo Piccioli pointed out its inherent danger on a political scale. If backward-looking sentiment implies (for example) rolling back women’s rights, then Piccioli wants none of it. That struck a chord: When nostalgia-speak is weaponized by the far right, you end up with MAGA and all it unleashes.

But there’s nothing to say that playing with nostalgia can’t be funny or intelligent, or that it can’t propose anything subversively new. You only have to look at Jonathan Anderson’s shows, both for his eponymous JW Anderson label and for Loewe, to understand that there was something wildly and creatively fun—and deliberately controversial—going on with his reconfigurations of disappeared elements of past cultures. He brought up an almost-embarrassing reference to the “grotesque” old English comedy Only Fools and Horses, ironically repositioning pre-Brexit working-class pensioner anti-style as youth culture fashion, complete with gray wig-hats and sheepskin slipper-boots. At Loewe, too, he layered references to a different bygone lifestyle—pertaining to wealth rather than the working class—located somewhere amongst the formalities and excesses of American upper echelons in the ’80s.

And in fashion, in a world of war amid the aftershocks of the pandemic, we are confronting all of this—asking ourselves where to look for comfort, or even whether it’s right to try to escape from our present reality. History is a slippery thing. It’s constantly being rewritten and reinvented. It isn’t stable, and it never stays still. It depends on who’s rediscovering it, and who is telling the stories. Designers—caught in time, as all of us are—are reminding us the important fact that humans do have memories. The nostalgia wave of the 2020s contains emotions that we know are collectively precious. What we can’t see now is that this is the essence of human creativity. That, perhaps, is the ultimate moral of the story—that optimism that can still light our way in these darkest of days.