My entire project Modern Retro is built on a specific kind of nostalgia -- imagining today's brands as 1970s retail stores. That's a fifty-year gap. A half-century of cultural distance between the source material and the reference point. It works because the seventies feel genuinely foreign. The colours, the typography, the whole aesthetic is from a different world. The gap is what makes it interesting.
But here's what I keep noticing: that gap is shrinking. Fast. And nobody seems particularly alarmed about what that means.
The twenty-year rule is dead
There used to be a reliable pattern in culture. Nostalgia operated on roughly a twenty-year cycle. The fifties revived in the seventies -- think Happy Days, Grease. The sixties came back in the eighties with mod revivals and vintage psychedelia. The seventies returned in the nineties -- flares, disco samples, Austin Powers. The eighties roared back in the 2000s. The nineties had their moment in the 2010s. Each generation reached back to the one that felt just distant enough to be exotic but close enough to be recognisable.
That cycle has compressed to the point of absurdity. In 2026, we're simultaneously nostalgic for the 2000s, the 2010s, and -- this is the part that gets me -- the early 2020s. TikTok creators are making content about "early pandemic nostalgia." People are genuinely wistful about 2019 as though it were a bygone era. There are aesthetic categories for years that happened less than a decade ago. "2018 core" is a thing. We're nostalgic for a time when most of us had the same phone we have now.
Why it's accelerating
Three things are driving this compression, and they're all connected.
First: documentation. Every moment is now recorded, tagged, and archived. In the nineties, you remembered the nineties through a haze of imperfect memory. A few photos, some VHS tapes, the songs that stuck. The gaps in the record left room for mythology. You could romanticise what you couldn't quite recall. Today, every year has a complete visual and audio archive. You can watch yourself living through 2019 on your Instagram grid. The documentation makes the past feel simultaneously more present and more distant -- you can see it perfectly, which somehow makes you miss it more.
Second: cultural velocity. Trends move so fast that aesthetics which would have defined a decade now last eighteen months. The clean minimalism of early Apple, the millennial pink era, the maximalist everything-is-a-meme period, cottagecore, dark academia, quiet luxury -- these aren't eras. They're seasons. And when cultural moments are that brief, the nostalgia that follows is equally brief. You don't need twenty years of distance to miss something that only lasted a year.
Third: the death of monoculture. When everyone watched the same shows, listened to the same albums, and followed the same trends, cultural memory was shared. The nostalgia for the nineties was collective because the nineties were experienced collectively. Now culture is fragmented into a thousand algorithmic niches. Your 2020 and my 2020 were completely different cultural experiences. So nostalgia becomes personal rather than generational. You're not missing an era. You're missing your specific, algorithmically curated version of an era.
What brands are getting wrong
The advertising industry loves nostalgia. It's the easiest emotional lever to pull. Slap a retro logo on something, use a song from twenty years ago, reference a cultural touchstone from the audience's youth. Done. Instant warmth. Instant engagement.
But the accelerating nostalgia cycle is breaking this playbook. If you're targeting Gen Z with nineties nostalgia, you're referencing an era they never experienced. If you're using 2010s references, you're already competing with their own memories -- and their memories are better documented than yours. The window in which a brand can leverage nostalgia is narrowing, and the emotional resonance is getting thinner.
I see this in how people respond to Modern Retro. The 1970s aesthetic works precisely because nobody alive today was shopping in a 1970s Nike store. The nostalgia isn't for a real memory -- it's for an imagined one. It's nostalgia for a past that never existed, which means it can't be fact-checked or contested. That's a different kind of emotional appeal, and I think it's actually more powerful than the traditional kind.
The present has a shelf life
What worries me about accelerating nostalgia is what it does to the present. If everything becomes nostalgic almost immediately, then nothing is truly contemporary. We're consuming the moment and categorising it as "retro" before it's even over. The present becomes a staging area for future nostalgia rather than something to be lived in.
I notice it in myself. I'll be somewhere good -- a restaurant, a gig, a walk through a part of London I love -- and catch myself thinking about how I'll remember it rather than experiencing it. The nostalgia instinct kicks in before the experience is complete. That's what happens when your brain has been trained to process everything as content, as memory, as a reference point for later.
There's a Japanese concept, mono no aware, that describes the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. The beauty of cherry blossoms is heightened by the knowledge that they'll fall. That's profound. That's a philosophy. What we've got in 2026 is the aggressive, industrialised version of the same idea -- except instead of cherry blossoms, it's TikTok sounds and iPhone models and last year's slang.
Where this leaves us
I don't think nostalgia is bad. I've built a project around it. My love of print magazines, peak Twitter, the 2000s digital advertising era -- these are genuine, deeply felt attachments to periods that shaped how I see the world. Nostalgia is how we make sense of time. It's how we locate ourselves in the stream of culture.
But the speed concerns me. When nostalgia was slow, it had weight. Missing the seventies in the nineties meant you'd lived two decades of change and could feel the distance between who you were and who you'd become. Missing 2019 in 2026 doesn't carry the same gravity. It's not transformation you're mourning. It's just the passage of time in a world that moves too fast to process.
Maybe the answer is to slow down. To stay in the present long enough to actually experience it. To resist the urge to categorise every moment as an aesthetic or an era the second it happens. To let things just be, without immediately processing them into nostalgia content.
Or maybe that ship has sailed. Maybe this is just how time works now -- compressed, documented, instantly available for replaying. And the skill isn't in slowing down, but in choosing which memories are worth the weight.
I know which ones I'd keep. The ones from before everything was recorded. The ones with gaps in the record. The ones I'm not entirely sure happened the way I remember them.
Those are the best kind.
