What Were You Like in the '90s? The Answer Isn't About What You Think.
A note to new readers: The Foxman Edit spent its first sixteen issues on LinkedIn. This is Issue 17 and our first official home on Substack. The full archive is right here. Glad you’re with us.
You know the trend by now. Someone films themselves today. A knowing smile. Then the cut. Photos pour in. Bad highlights. Great jackets. A specific kind of confidence that only exists before you know what’s coming. Underneath it all: “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. That guitar line. That voice. The question floating over the screen: Mom, what were you like in the ‘90s?
It’s everywhere. John Stamos posted his Uncle Jesse era. Kevin Bacon brought back the leather jackets. Reese Witherspoon. Brooke Shields. The Spice Girls. The Backstreet Boys. All of them happy to account for themselves.
I watched it roll across my feed this week and felt something I didn’t expect. Not nostalgia. Something more useful than that.
Because I was there. And I wasn’t just watching.
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Here’s what most people are missing.
This trend isn’t being driven by people who remember the ‘90s. It’s being driven by people who weren’t there. Gen Z and Gen Alpha, kids who have never known a day without a screen, scrolling through someone else’s pre-digital past and feeling something they can’t name.
Clay Routledge, a leading researcher on the science of nostalgia, said it plainly this week: younger generations are drawn to the pre-digital life because they want balance in their own digital lives. They think there’s something cool about the analog, tactile, in-person world.
They’re not wrong. They’re just describing something they’ve never had.
What they’re nostalgic for isn’t the ‘90s. It’s a feeling. Life at a lower frequency. Unmonitored. Unoptimized. The ‘90s is just the placeholder for everything the current internet is not.
That’s a generation telling you exactly what they’re starving for, in someone else’s words, through someone else’s photos, set to a song that came out before most of them were born.
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So. What was I like in the ‘90s?
I moved to New York in the mid-’90s and worked my way through a sequence of places that felt, at the time, like the center of everything: Spin. Details. The New Yorker. InStyle. And eventually Cargo, which I launched at 29. The biggest men’s magazine launch of its time. I was young enough to believe that meant something permanent.
What I remember most isn’t the mastheads. It’s the physics of daily life.
You dialed into your voicemail to find out if someone had called you. If they hadn’t left a message, you’d never know you missed them. You showed up on time because there was no way to say you were running late. You ran into people, actually ran into them, on the street, at a party, in a lobby, and entire relationships were born from that collision. Spontaneity wasn’t a personality trait. It was just Tuesday.
People took smoke breaks. In their offices. Film had to be developed before you knew if the shoot had worked. And if you wanted to be part of something, a trend, a movement, a cultural moment, you had to physically show up. You had to leave your apartment, get there, be in the room.
If you couldn’t get there, you waited. You read about it later in a magazine, filtered through an editor’s eye, arriving on your doorstep weeks after the fact.
The friction was the feature.
Baby-doll dresses and barrettes. Ska and skateboard proportions. “Iris” sitting at number one on the VH1 Top 20 Countdown for more weeks than I could count, not because of an algorithm, but because actual humans kept choosing it in a world where choosing something meant something.
You had to be there for it to be real. And so everything was.
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Here’s where brands need to pay attention.
The opportunists are already circling. Retro fonts. Film grain filters. Minimalist silhouettes in look books put together by people who weren’t alive for the original ones.
It’s going to miss. Completely.
Because what Gen Z is reaching for isn’t an aesthetic. It’s stakes. The feeling that something is real because people made sacrifices to make it real. The showing up. The lines around the block. The word of mouth that spread slowly and meant something because it was slow.
You can’t manufacture that. The moment you try, people feel it. Audiences are so fluent in the language of performance now that they can smell the gap between what a brand claims to be and what it actually is from a hundred miles away.
The brands that get this won’t chase the trend. They’ll become what it’s pointing toward. More present. Higher friction, higher reward. Real in the ways that cost something to be real.
It’s not the clothes or the music or even the magazines that people are missing. It’s the cost of admission. The fact that being there meant something.
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“Iris” is a song about not wanting the world to see you because the world won’t understand. About cutting through all of it and saying: I just want you to know who I am.
A generation raised on personal branding and the pressure to be watchable at all times is playing that song on a loop. Not because it’s nostalgic. Because it’s true. Because underneath every curated post and optimized caption is a person who wants exactly what John Rzeznik was singing about in 1998.
To be known. Without the performance.
The ‘90s are trending because being there, being real, and being seen used to be the same thing.
We’re still trying to figure out how to get there from here.
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The Foxman Edit publishes most Tuesdays at arielfoxman.substack.com. If someone forwarded this, subscribe here. And if you work with a brand navigating any of this — reply to this email. That's exactly what I do. Thanks!
Excellent Ariel!!
loved this! thank you!