Analogue

More and more, people are adopting the aesthetics of a previous era. It's music. It's clothing. Why? It could be the simple fact that there’s a comfort and a familiarity with things we had as children. Maybe it's a response to an ever more sleek, robotic and digital world not really representing what people actually want.

As a millennial, I can tell you about the pre-digital age. This is the mark of our generation. We're the last ones to grow up in the era before everything went online. Those times were messy and imperfect, but they were authentic. That’s what being human is. The music on a record doesn’t literally sound as crisp and clean as it does on a high-definition digital stream. Photos shot on film can be discolored and grainy. These things are quite literally not as good as something we currently have, so why have those aesthetics come back in vogue? It seems everyone has a record player and film camera now. And vintage shopping is all the rage.

It’s our subconscious way of recognizing the value of a past era. A time when we did things at a slower pace, with more painstaking care. Chatting it up at a local coffee shop is not the same as an anonymous conversation in a Reddit thread. That's not to say there's not sometimes value in a Reddit thread. Deep down I think we all realize that the digital world mostly leaves us lonely and detached. People are expressing this feeling through vintage aesthetics, trying to retain a slim grip on the authentic, humanized and analogue world that’s slowly escaping us.