Last week, I told a girl I liked her jacket. It was caramel-brown leather, oversized, with cuffs encrusted in imitation gems trying their best to replicate what glamour used to look like. “Thanks!” she replied. “It’s actually from Shein. Their new vintage leather is getting pretty good.” 

Shein. Vintage. Good.  

Please, tell me you too see why I had to hold my tongue and walk away.   

The thing is, her jacket wasn’t the problem. I did actually like it a lot. What unsettled me was the way nostalgia has virtually become a curated consumer trend, something you can add to cart. And business is booming. The evidence is everywhere. AI film-grain filters. Pinterest ‘old money’ boards. Shein and CIDER mass-producing ‘vintage’ clothes. It’s nostalgia run through an assembly line, manufactured imperfection sold back to Gen Z as authenticity.  

But why does it work so well?

Professor John Norberg contributes the rise of ‘false nostalgia’ marketing to selective memory and what he calls ‘rose-coloured capitalism’. In essence, individuals tend to mentally block out negative memories of the past, even a past they didn’t live through, making it seem like a more comfortable and familiar time. It’s a marketing tactic that thrives on insecurity, using our fear that the present is too unstable to be comfortable in. Our generation, amid the rapid technological and social changes of modern-day, is especially susceptible to desiring a ‘simpler time’. We blur out the past’s rough reality and delete the discomfort until it inevitably becomes a dream we mistake for memory. By capitalising on meta-nostalgia [i.e. nostalgia for nostalgia itself], corporations exploit people’s natural yearning for the past while conveniently glossing over its complexities.  

But comfort isn’t the only thing we seem to be chasing. People also long for a sense of community. Instead of embracing the present, many people long for a simpler, smaller, and more connected time (even if that time never actually existed). As with everything we desire, there is a product to be sold. Nostalgia, nowadays, is far less about memory and instead about ‘mood’: brands aren’t selling the past, they’re selling the feeling of having one. And within that transaction, what corporations sell most effectively isn’t time, but rather the sense of belonging.   

It’s easy enough to recognise that brands are exploiting nostalgia. Still, when I sat down to examine it, I was shocked by just how deeply that manipulation is woven into our culture. Take a look at your university, at the extent to which identity is solidified through alumni branding, campus rituals, and the myth that these are the best years of your life. It’s not just a simple sentiment—it’s strategic branding. Campus culture has long been building its own form of institutional nostalgia, and in its similarity to commercial nostalgia, it works to sell belonging and identity through borrowed memory.  

For Gen Z, this overlap runs deep. We’re living at the crossroads of institutional and commercial nostalgia. The former thrives on the aesthetic of heritage: dark-academia wardrobes, Latin mottos, hundred-year-old traditions. The latter feeds on digital retro: Y2K fashion, 80s-core, disposable cameras. Both promote authenticity, and both are manufactured. Authenticity has become one of our generation’s most hyped virtues and our biggest scam. 

When we consider the scale of investment and the extent to which nostalgia has been etched into our social fabric, they reveal something larger about Gen Z than just marketing. Upon my first approach to the topic, I expected to write the familiar critique on how easily our generation succumbs to capitalism and how authenticity has been commodified beyond recognition. However, I found it’s rather disheartening to get upset at our generation for buying into past aesthetics being pushed. Really, nostalgia and authenticity’s transformation into a product have far more to say about what we’re missing than what we’re buying. 

We are children of late capitalism, raised to find meaning in what can be bought and, consequently, to substitute depth for design. Our longing for the past speaks to a symptom rather than a weakness. It reflects the exhaustion of living in a world that moves too fast to hold onto. In the rush of progress, permanence feels extinct, and connection comes pre-filtered. We talk about individuality, but our tastes are algorithmically synchronised. Product manufacturing has developed so quickly that the communal foundations of shared culture that make fashion vibrant, unique, and alive are struggling to keep pace. More so, we see the slipping of the pivotal sense of the present and in its place, we turn to romanticising something distant. Nostalgia then functions as a proxy for authenticity and community, standing in for the connections that are harder to make. Maybe that’s the tragedy of it all, the fact that we’ve begun to confuse nostalgia with connection, letting the former thrive while the latter fades. Beneath the aesthetics and the irony, there’s a longing to touch something real, and there’s just a simple human need to belong to something that isn’t the fleeting present. 

So, sincerely, I don’t think that girl and her ‘new, vintage, Shein’ jacket is wrong. She wanted something real, something deeply human, even if she had to buy it.