If you’ve been (perhaps chronically) online in the past year or so, you’ve no doubt encountered the surge of nostalgia for all aspects of 2010s culture, from lifestyle to music, to movies, TV, and fashion. On Tiktok, Pretty Little Liars-inspired slideshows of clothes, lipstick-stained Starbucks cups, and dated Tuscan interiors garner hundreds of thousands of likes, as do montages of behind-the-scenes snaps of Victoria Secret angels, Instagram-filtered palm trees against a non-polluted LA sky, fuzzy Coachella candids from the heart of 2014 – a time when we were too young to worry about climate change or the job market.

Young people online today yearn for a way of living that now feels unreachable. We have transformed frighteningly quickly from considering 2010s fashion to be uniquely hideous (see: chevron domination, crop flare jeans, business casual to the club) to re-evaluating it as okay, I guess, and at last reaching full enlightenment: wait, maybe uggs are actually cute after all?

“We turn to the past, hoping to find comfort and identity in nostalgia”

Take, for instance, this list from Marie Clare charting the supposed worst fashion trends of the 2010s which, despite only being a year old, now reads as ridiculously out of date. Ugg boots? Having a full-on revival. Big totes? Balenciaga’s signature city tote has more cult appeal than ever. Stud details, slouchy boots, oversized sunglasses – all hallmarks of indie sleaze, which has been seeing an online renaissance since early last year. This blindingly swift pivot of opinion says something about our cultural moment. It reveals a frazzled, disillusioned set of young people searching for stability amid an increasingly destabilising world. Many of us no longer strive to look new, or different. Instead, we turn to the past, hoping to find comfort and identity in nostalgia.

“The 2010s with their flip phones and so-ugly-they’re-cute outfits seem warmly authentic compared to our culture of excessive self-fashioning”

Escapism seems the simplest explanation for this sudden cultural shift towards the early 2010s. A second-hand outfit has become a portal to a time when life felt more real. Since most of us are too young to seriously recall the era, we associate the 2010s with the innocence and ease of childhood, and we idealise those years as a world separate from ours. Our world is cold: we are perpetually connected and disconnected from one another through our phones, and our tastes are fed to us by app algorithms, which dictate trend cycles too rapid to keep up with. The 2010s with their flip phones and so-ugly-they’re-cute outfits seem warmly authentic compared to our culture of excessive self-fashioning.

But it is not all nostalgia. Our resurging desire for ‘vintage’ (2011) Hollister and Tumblr-style grunge are symptomatic of a wider affliction of ‘anachronism and inertia’ which plagues twenty-first century culture. We hide this beneath frenetic movement, digging up parts of past culture and pasting them into the present, but the void at the centre of our culture sings out still.

“I’d wager that we’ll see a resurrection for more 2010s fashion as we grow more disillusioned with the present”

The internet only hastens this process. Social media has spearheaded the emergence of fashion microtrends, in which a hot new item can debut, blow up, be declared tacky and sent to landfill all in the space of three weeks. Browse any charity shop and you’ll find it overflowing with the ghosts of microtrends past: bubble skirts, 2020s beloved cow print, poly-blend argyle-print vests. The internet is culture’s veritable Library of Alexandria, making it easier than ever to wed pieces of fashion and culture across time, pluck them from context and launch them into the content machine to see what sticks. Marooned in this cultural graveyard, we too are hollow, trying to make sense of our present by digging through the rayon scraps of the past.

Still, it’s undeniable that these trends are now leaking into the high street. With the recently announced Topshop revival, and brands like H&M’s persistent output of ‘boho chic’ inspired pieces, I’d wager that we’ll see a resurrection for more 2010s fashion as we grow more disillusioned with the present. But whether it will fill the cultural void inside us is another matter entirely. High streets are facing closures and decreasing foot traffic at alarming rates – what’s the use of a mall when you have every store there and more in your back pocket? There’s every possibility Topshop will be forced to close its doors for the second time.

The real-life echoes of our online obsessions are just another reminder that the present we yearn for is a mere gravesite, and no amount of aesthetic slideshows and Pinterest boards can bring its corpses back to life. After all, we are only consumers, not necromancers.