A resurgence of 90s pop culture in an age where technological advancements have taken over the world has in turn symbolized more than just shelves being stocked with countless flannels, jean jackets and windbreakers, but something much deeper.  My generation has popularized 90s fashion, culture, and art. By why? Is there an ever growing feeling that we need to reverse ourselves to the past because this futuristic world isn’t what we want?

 Taking a polaroid picture this day in age is useless, complicated and is generally a huge waste of time.  Why go to the trouble of printing out a poor quality image that could be so easily revised with a much better quality if we just snapped it on our phones.  So why go to the trouble? It’s vintage and aesthetic with a twist of odd familiarity of a time when things weren’t so easy. A day in age when when the first two numbers of the year started with a one and a nine, instead of our alien two and zero, and a time where humanity still hung onto the very last frames of a civilization not completely reliant on technology.   

Maybe we’ve reached the height of humanity’s expansion into a world where we can still keep our old, non technologically based ideals while also intermixing our lives with highly advanced usage of technology in society.  This change happens before we’ve introduced our lives to a world reliant on these advancements. That could explain society’s cultural shift to being new and inventive, unique and different to falling back on past cultural focusses like that of a 90s era vintage look.  But this link isn’t so out of the ordinary for what is currently going on in the world to a 90s cultural aspect.

90s culture, fashion and music was built on something out of this world, a feeling that could only come with a sense that humanity was going to embark on something enormous, and the change of the century and nonetheless the change of the millenium creates the perfect breeding for a futuristic look and ideology.  My generation is on the brink of living in two completely different worlds, the one we were born into where technology was widely used but failed to control every part of our everyday routine, and one where everything was based off of cutting edge technological designs and practices.

When I was five I would play outside with the neighborhood kids, bike around town, and sure I’d watch my fair share of television, yes but I was handed an iPad at age five, a tablet that contained all the wonders of the Internet that will soon extinguish the conformity of my upbringing.  For the youngest generation after my own, neighborhood friends will soon be replaced by Xbox Live accounts, and the only biking around town will be down in the Grand Theft Auto’s main metropolis, Los Santos. This is the clearest evidence that living in an age of far reaching, effective technology can trickle down and control humanity’s youth.  The youth nowadays will only use more technology in their lifespan, and living without the aid of technology will become a thing of the past. Maybe my generation is the last to experience what a life could look like without these advancements controlling basic daily routines, but we got to see it all. Schools no longer require a pen, pencil and notebook paper, while nowadays they instead mandate iPads and Chromes to perform even the simplest school assignments.  The Post Office is now an obsolete operation, only servicing those 65 and older, whole GMAIL and AOL service the rest of the population. We lived our early lives very different then what our lives are now becoming, and got to see the best of two worlds.

Younger members of society are starting to romanticize a rebirth of 90s culture with the help of majorly popular adolescent stores, such as Urban Outfitters and Pacsun shoving this renaissance down our throats.  While this means more than just a simple change of fashions trends and major clothing stores extorting and corrupting this 90s renaissance, it instead represents our youngest members of society as a whole. Our world is right about to become reliant on technological advancements in almost every aspect if our everyday lives, and maybe in some way adolescents feel they’re missing out major teenage landmarks that’d been romanticized and almost promised through old movies, TV shows, and music.  Asking someone out on a date is abnormal in everyday teenage life, but snapchatting someone “wanna hang” is perfectly normal, while we hangout with friends by facetiming the night away. Adolescents could be in some way refuting the inevitable future of our world becoming technologically based and in turn reliant upon. We might have something to learn from the Mickey Mouse Club, the Sandlot and Britney Spears after all, for their re-popularization is highly questionable and fueled by the non-conformists to this age of technological domination.