We’re pining for the ’90s. Yes, even its politics. Please explain

April 10, 2026 — 3:30pm

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Save this article for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.

Nineties nostalgia is very much in vogue. Inspired by the FX hit series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette – a dramatisation of events leading up to the couple’s fatal plane crash in 1999 – Instagram and TikTok is awash with users pining for a world without Instagram and TikTok. The music. The fashions. Those halcyon days uninterrupted by doomscrolling, online influencers, AI slop, the manosphere or even email. No wonder the social media trend “Mum, what were you like in the 1990s?” has become a thing.

My sense has long been that warning lights were flashing by the time Sex and the City first aired in 1998, alerting us to our impending civilisational decline. Already by then, what Vanity Fair dubbed “the Tabloid Decade” had served up Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tapes, Tonya Harding, Anna Nicole Smith, Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to her seventh husband, Larry Fortensky, the first accusations against Michael Jackson, John Wayne Bobbitt and his penis-severing wife, Lorena, and the OJ Simpson trial; not to mention the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump and his affair with Marla Maples.

Yet the very fact that it was Trump’s marital difficulties that made front page news, rather than his deranged threats to bomb adversaries back to the Stone Age, only heightens the sense of wistfulness. This was the decade, after all, when so many were seduced by the........

© Brisbane Times