Why Are We Doomed to Keep Reliving the '90s?

New York Times

13 hours ago

On the morning of Dec. 31, 1999, I took the subway into Manhattan from my home in Brooklyn. At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, I snapped a photo of the Millennium Clock with my 35-millimeter Kodak camera. Since 1998, a year after I first arrived in the city, it had been counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until the year 2000. I wanted a memento of that day. Then I high-tailed it off the island. If the world was going to shut down (or worse) at midnight, I intended to be closer to home.
When I returned to my apartment in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2000, having danced the night away at a sweaty bar in Williamsburg, I scrawled 'We made it!' across a page in my journal in sparkly pink pen.
Everything is different, and nothing has changed.
Had I gone to sleep on New Year's Eve in 1999 and waked today, Rip Van Winkle style, much of the world I left behind that night would still feel familiar. Fast-fashion hubs like Urban Outfitters are peddling baby tees and baby-doll dresses. Point-and-shoot cameras, like the one I toted into the city, flip phones and even smoking are making a comeback. Perhaps most notable, I'd still recognize a shocking number of the people currently wielding influence over our lives, not least because so many of them were prominent in New York City at the time.
A short, partial, list: In May, 'And Just Like That,' the 'Sex and the City' spinoff, premiered its third season, with Carrie still mooning over Aidan. Gwyneth Paltrow graced the April cover of Vanity Fair. Jennifer Lopez opened the American Music Awards. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are starring in two of this summer's blockbusters. Sean Combs was just on trial. TikTok has granted Carolyn Bessette Kennedy a certain immortality, and Ryan Murphy's upcoming 'American Love Story' is about the tragic arc of her relationship with John F. Kennedy Jr. When images from the show's wardrobe tests were released, a segment of the internet flew into a days-long outrage so intense that Mr. Murphy publicly mounted a defense.
It's not just pop culture. New Yorkers still have Chuck Schumer trolling the Senate; he took office in 1999 and never left. And, of course, our president: It was in the 1990s that Donald Trump became an avatar for wealth and excess. It's as though Generation X, of which I am solidly a member, is wreaking some strange revenge. The people we put in power and the culture we created currently have an outsize influence on the world.
Part of the allure of the 1990s is a longing for the days when we were a monoculture — a world before the fractured intake of smartphones, a time defined by a (retrospectively) comforting reality in which we experienced many of the same things at the same time. But I think there's more to it.
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