I was scrolling through the Gap app, as I do roughly twice a day, ostensibly looking for clothes for my children and actually checking whether the brand had dropped another matching set I could justify as “practical,” when I saw it—a bag that looked like someone had taken the Gap hoodie of my adolescence, removed the sleeves and given it somewhere to put my laptop. The Hoodie Tote costs $79.95, comes in Gap’s familiar sweatshirt fleece and has the arched logo embroidered above a kangaroo pocket. It is, essentially, a hoodie you carry.
Blue or gray, my usual Gap colors? The pink, which I could theoretically share with my daughters and almost certainly would not? And what about the little NYC pouch?
This is how nostalgia gets you. First, you are a grown woman buying a handbag. Then, for a second (or a shopping trip), you are 15.
Except something more interesting is happening here. Plenty of the people currently coveting Gap, Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, Coach and the old Ivy League uniforms of J. Press have little or no memory of these brands in the eras now being resurrected.
YouGov found last year that 65 percent of Gen Z considers the 1990s fashionable, even though the youngest members of that generation never experienced the decade. Young Americans, in other words, are becoming nostalgic for somebody else’s past. Fashion has spent years becoming astonishingly good at producing the new.
The internet can identify a microtrend on Monday, turn it into a shopping category by Wednesday and make it feel exhausted by Sunday. A 2026 study of Gen Z and secondhand clothing describes “symbolic nostalgia:” longing for a time a person did not actually experience, assembled instead from images, media, stories. Another recent study of Gen Z vintage shoppers found that their attraction to old clothes goes beyond sustainability and price and is bound up with identity and self-expression.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
