There is a very specific kind of bewilderment that comes with being told, at 30-something, that you are suddenly relevant again. Not because of anything you did. Not because of a reinvention or a comeback or a moment of inspired self-reflection, but simply because a younger generation has decided that the things you liked when you were 19 are, apparently, back in style.
I am talking about millennials. Or more precisely, I am talking about the very specific aesthetic universe we inhabited during our formative years in the early-to-mid 2000s, which is now being mined, remixed and repackaged with a speed and enthusiasm that is, frankly, a little disorienting.
In Johannesburg, you notice it before you can name it. The low-rise jeans at underground Gqom parties, Von Dutch-adjacent trucker caps and Juicy Couture velour on a 22-year-old who was in primary school when Paris Hilton made it famous. We’re seeing frosted lip liner on folks who have probably never owned a Nokia 3310. It’s all back, and it’s been heading in this direction for quite some time. All of it is being worn without irony, or at least, with the kind of irony that ultimately functions as sincere affection.
The 20-year loop
Fashion has always operated on a nostalgia cycle. Fashion historian James Laver has suggested that styles tend to become romanticised roughly half a century after their peak. This is distant enough to feel nostalgic, but close enough to feel familiar. I would argue that with things moving much faster today, this period has been quite significantly reduced to about 20-30 years. This would be the reason the 1990s were everywhere in the 2010s and why those of us who came of age in the early 2000s are now watching our teenage years be excavated and held up to the light.
A 2023 survey from GWI Zeitgeist found that 56% of Gen Z feels nostalgic for the 2000s; an era most of them never actually lived through as teenagers. That statistic lands with a particular strangeness. The 2000s feel like a recent memory to many of us. Most certainly for me! But for the 20-somethings currently thrifting butterfly clips and denim-on-denim outfits at Dunusa or second-hand stores scattered across Johannesburg, it is the distant past.
The aesthetic vacuum of the present
Here is the thing nobody quite wants to say directly: the 2020s have not yet produced a defining aesthetic of their own. I mean this as an observation, not an insult. Every decade up to this one had a visual signature you could identify at a glance. It’s the maximalist neon of the 80s, the grunge slouch of the 90s, the low-rise crystalline exuberance of the early 2000s. Even the 2010s had its fingerprints all over everything via the Instagram grid, the millennial pink, the obsessively curated minimalism of marble countertops and sans-serif fonts.
The 2020s? So far, the clearest aesthetic of this decade is the absence of one. What we have instead is a rotating carousel of borrowed eras, shuffled and served up by TikTok’s algorithm at a pace that makes it essentially impossible for anything to settle into the cultural bedrock. Cottagecore. Clean girl. Old money. Mob wife. Brat. Dark academia. Each one arrives with a brief period of feverish adoption, then evaporates before it can mean anything.
When a culture built on repetition is fostered, we begin to lose any real sense of risk, imagination, or progress. The very idea of subculture becomes blurred when reduced to only its visuals. Where trends once emerged from tight-knit communities, entire eras now get codified as identities themselves. It doesn’t help much that we are now firmly in the AI era, where originality is increasingly unsuccessfully competing with a culture-wide adoption of derivative slop in music, art and across culture.
This is, if nothing else, an explanation for why millennial aesthetics are having such a moment right now. In the absence of anything genuinely new, humans go looking for something that at least feels coherent, and the early 2000s, with its rhinestones and low-rises and crystalline confidence, has a coherence that the present decade simply cannot match.
The analogue turn
Alongside the fashion revival, something quieter and more interesting is happening. Call it the analogue turn — vinyl records, film photographs, cassette tapes and disposable cameras. The kind of technology that requires patience, that produces imperfection, that refuses to let you undo what you have done.
The numbers are not ambiguous. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, vinyl record sales reached 43.6-million units in 2024, marking the 18th consecutive year of growth. Gen Z has emerged as the primary driver of the upturn. Kodak’s 2024 film stock sales surged 20% year on year. According to Luminate’s entertainment research, Gen Z listeners are 27% more likely to purchase vinyl records than the average music consumer. Half of US vinyl buyers do not even own a record player. They are buying the physical object as a token of identity, a statement about what kind of person they are choosing to be. This much is evident on TikTok, where many gleefully post their collections for others to see.
The ironic social-media component: midcentury modern and retro design objects are simple, often show-stopping artefacts that carry a lot of social currency in a generation that prioritises publishing their life online. The analogue revival is, in other words, both a genuine retreat from the digital world and a highly photogenic performance of that retreat.
What South Africa brings to the table
I think the most interesting thing about watching the global millennial revival play out from Johannesburg is that South Africa has always, in some sense, operated on its own aesthetic timeline. Our fashion in the early 2000s was shaped by very different forces than those at play in the US or Europe. Kwaito, with its oversized silhouettes, bucket hats, and particular relationship to luxury branding, was setting the sartorial tone in the townships before any of us had heard of Y2K as an aesthetic category. Lebo Mathosa, TKZee, and Trompies were building a visual language that was entirely their own.
That local history makes the current moment both more layered and more exciting. When South African designers and style communities engage with nostalgia now, they are not simply borrowing from the global Y2K archive; they are pulling from something more specific, more particular. It is a local visual memory that has its own textures and references.
Wanted
