Back to Y2K
(আগে কি সুন্দর দিন কাটাইতাম)
Is your social feed littered with bright lavender and pink-themed posts? Or are your friends posting those retro VHS/VCR-styled videos, with the date and time in the bottom left corner? If so you must feel like the 2000s are making a comeback. Well, you’re not wrong it is actually making a comeback and people have taken to calling this movement “the dramatic rebirth of Y2K”.
The Y2K means the Year 2000 problem. This means that computer nerds feared that the internal calendars of computers would reset, wreaking havoc in all systems worldwide. If you are here to learn more about the problem, well you have not come to the right place! However, you’re exactly at the right place if you want to know the why and how of Y2K's aesthetical resurgence.
Like any movement that begins, the Y2K movement began quite humbly back in 2016. Back then it was still relatively small and insignificant. This aesthetic began with the rise in popularity of the Vaporwave sub-genre of music where the cover arts of songs induced nostalgia and memories of the early 2000s just like the music did as well. Over time, this aesthetic evolved into what we know today as the resurgence of Y2K.
Due to the recent rise in Y2K aesthetic designs are now starting to shift from the more corporate refined styles to a much more “trashy” look which was a result of the technical constraints back in the year 2000. Bright solid colors, gradients 😱and a nostalgic look to things. Companies are now using this look to take part in “Nostalgia Marketing” a relatively small trend but one that can gain great traction over time as there is no drug more powerful than Nostalgia, reminding us of a time when the world had fewer problems than it does today.
Funnily enough, millennials who have experienced and lived through this aesthetic are not that keen on adopting this style. It's Gen-Zs who are bringing this style back through the content they upload on social media and the fashion that they are now wearing. It all harkens back to a time when people wore baggy bright colored clothes and just plain looked weird, to a time the Gen-Zs were not even born! So why are they so obsessed with it if they can't relate to the time?
Well to put it simply, Gen-Zs are tired. The pandemic, global warming, conflicts worldwide, and information overload has weathered the children and withered their spirits down quite a bit. As a result, they’ve seen what life was like in the 90s and the 2000s they see that times were much simpler and life was not problematic as it is now. They are adopting this aesthetic in droves, for one simple reason: comfort. Millennials are not that interested in this aesthetic, maybe because they moved on from it and now find comfort in more mature aspects of life as they have grown up and now have children!
Regardless of generation, there is a great audience hungry for Nostalgia. Everyone is tired in some way or the other and often thinks back to a much more peaceful time. The 2000s just after Y2K was a time of great optimism, technological advancements almost felt like witchcraft, and the marketing of that time coupled with the style of almost everything reflected optimistic attitudes people want to feel this again and marketers are realizing this. To end with a great example, Glass Animals a British band released an album in 2020 called Dreamland which used Nostalgia Marketing to become a hit.
Written by Muqaddim Jawad Noor
