Why Is 2024 So Obsessed With 2004?
When did you first feel ‘old’? I’ll go. It was not when I started getting twinges in my back or injections in my face, nor when my baby sister became a mum or I grasped that a credit card was not in fact ‘free money’. Nope, when I first began to feel (and definitely sound) old was when I found myself saying ‘I remember that the first time around’ with alarming regularity. The ‘that’ in question being any one of the many early Noughties trends that have been resurrected in the last couple of years.
I don’t just remember them, mind, as a ‘geriatric millennial’ (charming!) I really lived them. I danced at regional clubs to Mr. Brightside. I was invested in the fate of ‘Bennifer’. I rooted for a Democratic Presidential nominee. It all sounds familiar; it is familiar. 2024 bears a striking resemblance to 2004 (re the above: this year, the Killers’ track became the UK’s biggest-selling song to never reach number one; the J-Lo/Ben Affleck relationship scrutiny thrives once more; swap John Kerry for Joe Biden).
Want more? How about the fact that much of this year’s Glastonbury line-up – Coldplay, Shania Twain, Avril Lavigne, Keane, Faithless – would still be familiar to anyone who hasn’t kept up with music in the past two decades? For those who have, isn’t the Charli XCX-authored ‘Brat Girl Summer’ a moment of vindication for the ‘hot mess’ it-girls of the early-Noughties?
Speaking of, have you seen the snaps of Ellie Bamber as Kate Moss at her legendary 30th birthday bash, in a forthcoming biopic of Croydon’s finest? That 2004 party remains the gold standard of debauched, hot messiness. For something a bit more wholesome, what about the pic of Lindsay Lohan and Jaime Lee Curtis on set of Freaky Friday 2, some 21 years after the original? In a 2004/2024 head-to-head, there are parallels both concerning (see Ozempic and the renewed ‘size zero’ dialogue) and galvanising (a belief in the power of people, the scale of the Israel-Hamas protests comparable with the 2003 Stop the War march).
Where you can most obviously see the parallels between then and now, however, is in fashion. Despite a trend cycle of dizzying speed, Y2K has been having a curiously persistent moment for a few seasons now. But that interpretation of the era has skewed towards a very poppy, very LA-ish take via pieces (Juicy, Von Dutch, visible thongs) that demand to be worn with a heavy dose of irony.
What is emerging now is a softer take, likely more reflective of how many of us who actually lived it, actually dressed at the time. Or at least wanted to. It is the Noughties as seen through a normie’s aspirational perspective, rather than as imagined on party-hopping Perez Hilton fodder. So, we’re talking Mulberry totes and Balenciaga City bags, skinny jeans (ta, Miu Miu, Celine), ballet pumps and – still a point of obsession for millennials – the comeback of boho. My tastes in summer 2024 are pretty interchangeable with my tastes in 2004. Then: I wore floaty smocks and saucer sized sunglasses, big pointless belts and armfuls of bangles. Now: same, same and same. I coveted Nicolas Ghesquière’s Balenciaga, Phoebe Philo’s Chloé and Tom Ford’s Gucci at the tail end of my teens as I still do now as I head towards 40.
Why then the enduring infatuation with a very specific slice of the Noughties? I have a theory – although it pertains specifically to women in their thirties and forties. For us, it is a chance to revisit our youth but with access to finances and legit ID – pull on those J Brands and cheers to that with a Smirnoff Ice. Secondly, more generally, there is something particularly appealing about that specific moment of time. Thanks to the Internet, it was a period when the world felt flung wide open, and yet also intimate. Pre-social media as we now know it (Facebook only launched in 2004), it was a sweet spot of communication but before oversharing and its attendant risks. Then I imagine technology and the Internet was a bit like smoking was in the 1960s… Delicious, to be enjoyed without fear of consequence! We had online shopping but not the ability to order everything from and to our sofas, encouraging greater personal style. We had phones and could, thus, flirt and chat via Pay As You Go texts with strictly rationed character limits but were yet to be confronted with uninvited dick pics, spam or exhausting WhatsApp groups.
Being a teenage girl or a young woman has always been hideously uncomfortable, and we hardly got off free then (see: size zero, celebrity magazines circling cellulite and pitting women against one another). But the early Noughties were, I think, a privileged time to be young; so little consequence, so much possibility. Just remember, in 2004 if someone had told you Donald Trump would be President in a few years, it would have read as a strange, surreal joke without a punchline.
Perhaps I am rose tinting it. But that is exactly why a 20 year gap is something of a sweet spot for nostalgia; close enough to have been experienced first-hand, far enough away as to be romanticised. It’s like looking back on an ex with a fondness that has been cemented by time rather than genuine affection – it’s easier to look at the ones a few relationships ago than the most recent.
And maybe it is just the inevitable pace of trends. I was reminded today that at my 2003 18th birthday party, I wore an outfit which owed much to the 1980s – a similar 20 year age gap. As my mum said to an eye-rolling, know-it-all me back then, ‘I remember that the first time around’.
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