25.4 REGRESSIVE NOSTALGIA

Saved the worst for last

Last week, I left a rambling comment about this trend on a

Feed Me

post that received quite a bit of traction, prompted a mandate from

Emily Sundberg

, and gained me some new subscribers (hi! thank you so much for being here!). This post expands on that comment, but also functions as the fourth and final part of my 2025 Macrotrend Report. It’s different than the others, though, and requires a longer intro — I hope it makes sense.

yes ma’am

I’ve been thinking about Regressive Nostalgia for a while. I wrote about the disappearance of DEI last April, and these topics have been an amorphous presence the back of my mind for most of 2024, before crystalizing around the election. It was really obvious to me, based on the pop cultural climate, that Trump was likely to win, barring a miracle. I was not surprised at the results of the election, nor the fact that Gen Z has a strong conservative faction. But I was surprised that others were surprised. As an example, the recently surging fascination with and idealization of regressive portrayals of womanhood and femininity were pretty clear indicators of our current moment.

ISSUE 22 : FROM TRAD WIVES TO TRUMP

I don’t think people didn’t see the signs - most of us are not oblivious or dense. But many actively chose to ignore the conservative undertones because they made them uncomfortable. Some chose to pretend that these were fringe ideas, while others painted them as innocuous — just superficial aesthetics.¹ We let our biases inform our worldview because it’s easier. Taking the influence and implications of these trends seriously, and considering them as reflections of a true cultural shift, would have been difficult and unsettling. It would have forced us to contend with the fact that championing progressive values was suddenly swimming against the cultural current, rather than with it. Culture is starting to feel regressive.

This creates lot of tension when applying trends to brand strategy. Most people (at least those I know) enter these fields because they are optimistic about the idea of contributing towards a better future. If I ignore the existence of a signal like tradwives, which I know clearly has bigger cultural implications beyond social media content, then I am technically not doing my job properly. But this ignorance is somewhat of an unspoken consensus in the trend forecasting and brand strategy worlds. WGSN is one of the biggest trend agencies in the world, with tens of thousands of reports on its website, and a cursory search of their database delivers (3) minor results for the term tradwife/tradwives. I searched this share drive of 200+ trend reports for 2025 and found exactly (2) minor mentions. Minor like, ‘tradwife’ floating within a word map graphic with no further context. Nobody is talking about it, and that’s purposeful — nobody wants to be identifiable as the reason why a brand promotes something they consider problematic.

But feigning ignorance and wishing it would all fade away hasn’t worked. We need a different approach. I think a starting point is accepting the trend exists, attempting to understand why various signals have gained traction, and analyzing how these microtrends are interconnected on a macro level.

Unlike the trends discussed in the previous three letters, Regressive Nostalgia does not fit neatly in my existing macrotrend framework. For the first time in five years, I may need to update it. 🥺 But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Right now it’s still a dotted line.

The origin of Regressive Nostalgia is clearly rooted in the social drivers space, and it sits in direct opposition to Sovereign Systems. If this framework was somehow a 3D model rather than a 2D image, these would be opposing sides of the same coin; black mirror reflections of each other. They are equal but opposite reactions to the same drivers — issues like systemic inequities & the widening wealth gap or evolving demographics & the great migration. Sovereign Systems imagines how to design new structures that solve for these issues via innovative concepts like decentralized ownership or tech-enabled mutual aid. In contrast, Regressive Nostalgia clings to the fallacy that we can somehow rewind to a time when these issues simply did not exist; a time when, for instance, America seemed great. MAGA is essentially Regressive Nostalgia:

Washington Post / Vacation Sunscreen / Nara Smith in GQ / New York Magazine / La Tête d’Or / Glamour / Guardian / OddCritic

Regressive Nostalgia: As socioeconomic turmoil leads to feelings of disillusionment and disenfranchisement, there is a yearning to return to ‘the good old times.’

• 50s Idealism: This is rooted in the romanticization of domestic life and traditional gender roles; encompassing tradwifery, stay-at-home-girlfriends, Ballerina Farm dreams, pining for finance guys with blue eyes, etc. So far, this has manifested aesthetically mostly through the cottagecore/homesteading sort of world. But it feels like we may be moving towards an even more literal interpretation, i.e. recent buzz around the “retro bob.” In many ways, the tenniscore micro-trend and retro country club aesthetics, aligned with the rise racquet sports, were early indictors of 50s (and early 60s) idealism somewhat masked by the sport associations.

• 80s Aspirations: The glamorization of Wall Street work culture and hedonistic excess, from the office siren aesthetic to the revival of caviar and martinis at opulent throwback-style restaurants, makes clear reference to the 1980s, as does blown-out “Republican hair.” We’re moving, in reverse, from conscious consumption back to conspicuous consumption.

  Sean Monahan
  calls it Boom Boom Aesthetics and pins Poolsuite / Vacation as one of the first to tap into the shift. The current resurgence of conservative ideologies, even in the bluest of states, as a response to progressive wokeism is akin to Reagan’s ascent after the free-spirited late 60s and 70s, and reminiscent of the last time New York voted for Republican governance.

I’m proposing these two trends are intertwined, within the macrotrend of Regressive Nostalgia. The 80s was a decade when people were also very nostalgic for the 50s — as seen in Grease. The Frankenstein fusion of both these decades is what we’re seeing now. This shift is what will dictate aesthetic trends for at least the next year, and potentially the remainder of the 2020s. From a heteronormative female perspective, the suggested dream is: be the office siren to land the man and achieve tradwife status.

What is initially most confounding about this trend, I think, is that its popularity among certain youth factions doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. These past decades were obviously only “good old times” for rich white men. Young women are certainly better off today than in the 50s, so why are they dreaming about being tradwives? The rosy memories seem to forget the realities of housewives imprisoned in thankless marriages and abusive arrangements. The political and economic developments of the 80s — “greed is good” and the War on Drugs — had devastating long-term consequences for the majority of Americans, and particularly underprivileged communities, that we are still experiencing to this day. Why are we so keen to repeat the mistakes of history?

The perspective that everything was better in the past was always common amongst white Boomer men, but Monahan suggests that conservatism’s newfound stronghold amongst Gen Z is a response to the fact that progressivism is now, by default of mass Millennial popularity, wildly uncool:

“The hippie isn’t the rebel or the revolutionary. The hippie is your principal, the hippie is your boss, the hippie is your government. What in the sixties would be referred to as ‘The Man’ or ‘The Establishment’ is the outsider perspective in 2024.”

I theorize this pendulum swing is exacerbated by the fact that Gen Z lacks authentic references to ground them in history.² Gen X and older millennial women had Boomer grandmothers or their own mothers to tell the true stories of what life was actually like as a housewife, and to drill the significance of self-sufficiency into our hardwiring. Gen Z and some younger millennials didn’t have that. There is a generational experience gap. Instead, they witnessed different issues — overworked mothers trying to do it all; Millennials unable to buy a homes and choosing to live with their parents into their 30s in a desperate attempt to save money. On a superficial level, young people see movies and magazines from times past and think life seemed nice enough, and definitely easier. In our contemporary hypervisual culture, we make these judgements based on aesthetics and pop iconography, rather than actually considering subtext.

This same mindset is influencing the rise of another subtrend:

• Unwellness: After a decade of wellness obsession, which continues to escalate, we are seeing an emerging countertrend rejecting health conscious culture. This is evidenced by the rise of cigarettes and Zyn. Gen Z Americans didn’t see their grandparents or parents deal with lung cancer; they grew up in a world where smoking was expunged from culture to a point where it barely existed. Again, from a visual culture perspective, smoking looks cool. Because your parents aren’t doing it, it feels edgy.

I believe that all of three of these subtrends are interrelated as elements of the larger cultural shift towards Regressive Nostalgia. What do we do about that, if we don’t like it? I don’t know. I’m not sure that we’ve ever had to deal the issue of cultural regression before, at least in the span of my career.³ What’s certain though, is that we can’t keep ignoring this shift and treating these trends as anomalies. I hope that, at the very least, more understanding of the why and how behind trends helps us think more critically about our engagement with these aesthetics. I feel that it is particularly important to consider how our rapid shift towards hypervisualization, and the tendency for internet culture to divorce images from context, plays a role in fueling the rise of regression.

Finally, I do think it’s interesting to contemplate how Gen Z’s response to this shift may change as it becomes clear that it is accompanied by policy and not just aesthetics. Dressing like an ‘office siren’ seems fun, but will it still be as enticing once paired with the realities of the daily office grind combined with the skyrocketing cost of childcare? Unlike the 80s, when popular culture was dictated by those in power, we live in a time where the mass consumer has a voice via social media (at least for now). Will people buy into the Boom Boom world, or will they push back? Will there be an emerging countercultural rebellion, like punk in the late 70s/early 80s? Would love to know what you think.

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Addendum: After publishing, I discovered the The Up and Up newsletter by

Rachel Janfaza

, an expert on youth political culture. Her piece on Gen Z nostalgia is short, sharp and poignant. Above, I’d made a conjecture about the generational fascination with nostalgia and distortion of historical truth. Rachel’s post emphasizes that this is a deeply ingrained mindset with massive cultural implications.

Romanticizing the past isn’t a trend for Gen Z, it’s survival.

1. The internet’s favorite tradwife, Nara Smith, insisted “It’s really not that deep.” That soothed concerns enough for her to land gigs with Marc Jacobs and Aritzia. Meanwhile, her husband reposted a video celebrating Trump’s win…so maybe it was that deep?

2. Forget Reaganomics, 1 in 5 young Americans don’t even know enough about history to believe the Holocaust actually occurred.

3. If you have any ideas, or if you’re more experienced than me and feel like you have had to deal with it, please share your perspective!