Our present actually seems to become history later on. So it’s time to take a close look at the pop culture present in this column. What happens? And how and why is it all connected? Here episode 27, in which Julia Friese explains what is behind the term Nowstalgia.
Three observations:
1. everything everywhere all at once
Everything goes fast. More quickly. Clothing hanging in the fast fashion stores last hung there ten years ago. The 2010s are back in trend, alongside the ’00s and ’90s, with ’90s fashion metabolizing the ’60s and ’70s. So you can say: Everything is in right now that just happened. Death To Stock, an American trending stock photo agency run by artists, calls this condition “Nowstalgia.”
The previous 20-year trend cycle is about to overtake itself. Trends have long had – and still have – a nostalgic element. As the PR theorist Edward Bernays once wrote, they sell the past to the future. Nina Chuba’s hit single “Mangos mit Chili” is Katy Perry’s “Chained To The Rhythm” (2017) in German and with different lyrics. Other songs on their album are reminiscent of Seeed and Kraftklub.
Her 2010 reminiscence sound, performed in a nineties and Y2K look, works because Chuba makes it sufficiently “different”: Her Kraftklub Seeed is young and female, her Katy Perry German. On the other hand, the 2000s pastiche sound of American pop singer Ava Max, whose biggest hits are all interpolations – “My Head & My Heart” (2020), for example, feeds on ATC’s “All Around Te World” (2000). However, in an all-too-congruent performance as a Lady Gaga or Sia doublet, it feels empty and hollow.
2. inflation: to German bloat, blow up
In the video for “I don’t think I want to go anymore today”, Nina Chuba wears a vest that looks like a deconstructed puffer jacket. A gummy down tube that makes it look like a kid — or Jeff Koons — drew a vest in Paint program — and then let a 3D printer do the rest. For some time now, this rounded, somehow digital-looking comic book aesthetic of textiles has been seen in so-called soft bags, which are placed around the body like large cushions, or in the increasingly voluminous puffer jackets and parachute pants, and recently also in boots that then three days went viral.
This red boot by Brooklyn art collective MSCHF seems straight out of Papa Smurf’s closet, but also nods to the 2000s UGG fur boots and the over-chunky Balenciaga wellies that Ye West waded through his ruin in late 2022. Shoes, the images are of shoes. Not made for feet, but for eyes. Objects that look like you can put them on your avatar in the Metaverse. Clothing that takes the wearer away from reality and at the same time serves as an airbag. A double protection function. For the coming autumn/winter, Louis Vuitton is showing hat caps with earflaps that appear inflatable. To keep them from flying off, tie them under your chin.
3. sapphire & steel
Rihanna mixed all these Nowstalgia elements in her Super Bowl performance this year. She was dressed in a puff coat and wore red MSCHF boots. In addition, the stomach of the artist of the recent past was bloated by the future. Pregnant, she danced surrounded by white-clad dancers under puffy hoods that airbagged their heads.
She performed her 2000s and 2010s songs in the guise of digital inflation, which she let fly into the empty evening sky in the finale of the performance for “Diamonds” (2012). A concert that was of course not an end in itself, but an advertisement for Rihanna’s make-up line, which she pretended to use make-up on during the performance. The ghost of writer Mark Fisher whistled softly through the stadium.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 05/2023.