There is a point at which a trend becomes a state. We are culturally reliving the 1990s. Or at least there is a desire to pull the 1990s through time into the mid-2020s. I can understand why.

The current social and cultural era is – and I believe this is the correct social science term – a s**tshow.

So we want something else – specifically a mythical place where people hung around cafes without computers, read books on public transport, where people could afford rent in lively cities, where the T-shirts were larger, meals were cheaper, essential messages were communicated via answering machines or simply transmitted by calling around to friends’ flats where they lived independently, stopping off to return their Pulp Fiction rental back to the video shop. This is the idealised 1990s, specifically the idealised early-to-mid-1990s.

For people born in the 21st century, it is also a state of anemoia, a feeling of longing for a past that you didn’t experience. It’s also a cycle. In the 1990s, the 1960s were culturally revived. It makes sense that in the 2020s, the 1990s would come back. Call it a Saturnian return, but the 1990s are now so omnipresent in our culture that it feels we are living in parallel time of reality (now), and desire (then).

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This is articulating itself aesthetically in fashion and design. It is manifesting behaviourally in ways such as social media use peaking four years ago before declining among those born in the 21st century. It is making itself felt technologically through a renewed interest in “old” tech, and aspirationally through wanting to “get back” to something more authentic, something freer. It’s there in the “what were you like in the 90s” social media trend, in the constant revival and re-revival of songs such as Dreams by the Cranberries, in the obsession with vintage rock T-shirts (some Sonic Youth ones sell for around €900) and in how Gen Z treat the show Friends as a comfort blanket.

One of the common contemporary scream-sighs is “get me off this timeline”. This “timeline” refers to both a context and trajectory; war, rising authoritarianism, climate disaster, tech dystopia and incessantly frazzled and frazzling “discourse”. The confluence of drill-baby-drill, missile-firing, AI-demon-conjuring, fascist-squawking, head-melting recklessness of our age is prompting a movement. The 1990s appear to be safer ground, especially if you never actually experienced them.

I rang one of Ireland’s leading stylists, Corina Gaffey, to see what she thought about the aesthetics of it all. She spoke about an article she had finished writing recently about 1990s fashion – Love Story and CBK (Carolyn Bessette Kennedy) – which caught the moment of minimalism in that decade. “Gen Z are all looking back thinking ‘that was a simpler time’,” she said, “It’s about rejecting the contemporary.” Who doesn’t feel that urge?

But Gaffey also cited another interesting desire: mystery. How would people live now if they felt that no one was watching, and if they didn’t want to sacrifice themselves to surveillance? I think a lot of people would like to find out.

[ What’s the ‘Gen Z stare’, and why are people talking about it?Opens in new window ]

Those in thrall to large social media follower counts and dominance in “the discourse” hunt for attention in a manner that feels increasingly – socially and culturally – pointless. Attention-craving belongs to the last decade. Being unseen, offline or “outside” hints at a preferential – maybe even morally superior or socially purer – state. This of course was the state of the 1990s because the dopamine machines of social media didn’t exist then (some people took ecstasy instead).

As a teenager in the late 1990s, I’m not entirely convinced I’ve ever spiritually left the decade. Luckily for me, I don’t have to. Gen Z may be wearing baggier jean legs, spearheading Courtney Love’s renaissance, forming grungy rock bands, throwing clandestine raves, shooting on Hi8 tape and cringing at Millennial influencers, but it’s not just about Gen Z: in the hierarchies of creative fields, those who lived through the 90s are now in positions of power and revisiting the contexts of their formative years.

When I was speaking to the New York author and activist Sarah Schulman recently, she remarked that on a recent US book tour of more than 30 cities, she noticed the social and cultural infrastructure of smaller cities was changing. It used to be the case, she said, that queer people would flee smaller cities for larger ones in order to find their communities and become part of a broader creative underground. But now, because large cities are so expensive – there are no more Madonnas arriving to New York City with $35 in their pocket – queer people and artists are staying in regional cities and building scenes there. The dominance of large bookstore chains, she said, has been broken. In all of these cities, she found independent bookstores, many of them less than four years old. People want to hang out in real life. People are lonely and trying to connect again. Hanging out is the building block of every scene and movement ever. And hanging out is pretty 1990s.

Will the neo-1990s last? I am old enough to remember the “trend” of Millennials rejecting digital culture and building hipster culture out of nothing but typewriters, record players and 35mm point-and-shoot cameras. Then we wrecked everything by getting hooked on social media and thinking a chronically online world was exciting. To Gen Z (reading in print, no doubt): keep at it. You are correct. This timeline isn’t great. If you can bring back hanging out, better music and clothes, actually break the internet, and reject superficiality, I’m all for it.

© The Irish Times