1. a publication containing a variety of works
2. a concise but comprehensive summary of a larger work
Nineties nostalgia is of course nothing new — the pop-cultural landscape has long been littered with hallmarks of the early part of that decade, like flannel and “Jock Jams”-worthy athleisure, and the revivalist sounds to match. But time marches on, and so, too, does that roughly 20-year cycle of the old becoming stylishly new again. And now the halcyon, almost-forgotten pop artifacts of the late ’90s — boy bands, winking futurism, inordinate amounts of glitter — are being dusted off and refurbished by today’s younger stars.
The fashion and design worlds got to this future nostalgia first. In 2016, Evan Collins started a popular Tumblr called the Institute for Y2K Aesthetics, which one write-up described as a compendium of “Baby G watches, Britney Spears cradling a robot dog, a shimmering pink bean-shaped Walkman, [and] inflatable backpacks.” Last July, GQ ran a piece about why, suddenly, “Y2K-era gear became the hottest thing in the vintage-clothing world.” Bold, label-obsessed and often future-fixated, the style of that window of time between 1995 and 2001 was the result of, as the writer Erin Schwartz noted, a “jumble of excitement and anxiety about the spread of technology at the turn of the millennium.”
