Why 2016 nostalgia is suddenly everywhere – and why midlife women can’t look away

Ten years on, 2016 is suddenly everywhere on social media – and midlife women like me can’t stop watching.

TikTok and Instagram are full of 2016 nostalgia, from Kate Middleton's best 2016 outfit to disbelief that TikTok didn’t exist a decade ago.

Why? For anyone in their late twenties or early thirties, a decade feels like a milestone, which means they’ve just been hit with a serious surge of nostalgia – possibly for the first time in adulthood.

Like all good moments of nostalgia, the 2016 trend is all about looking back through rose-tinted glasses, allowing ourselves to believe that everything was somehow better, easier, or simpler a decade ago.

Now, if you’re observing this as a 40-something or older woman, I think I know exactly what you’re thinking. You've probably had to do some quick mental maths to check they haven’t got it all wrong, and 2016 actually was a decade ago. Because to us, it feels like a few years ago, at most. I’ve probably got emails from 2016 that I haven’t yet got round to replying to. To midlife women, as I heard someone joke, 2016 feels like it was only a couple of Botox appointments ago. Meanwhile, all around us, a new generation of women is sharing pre-pandemic memories and throwbacks as if leafing through the dusty annals of time.

‘2016 did have such a vibe to it,’ says woman&home Head of News, Caitlin Elliott. ‘My friends and I used to wear a choker for every night out, and all my Uni pics have the Snapchat dog filter!’

I’m pretty sure the choker thing is really a 90s trend that made a comeback in the mid 2010s, but that’s beside the point. Once I got past my shock that yes indeed, 2016 was ten years ago, I realised something unexpected - it’s actually rather lovely to listen to my colleagues reminisce about their lives ten years ago. They swap stories about Top Shop Jamie jeans and first jobs before hybrid-working was even a thing, with the same fond disbelief that my friends and I reserve for bootcut jeans, dark lip liner with lipstick several shades lighter, and those wispy bits of fringe that we spent hours gelling into place until we thought they looked effortless.

Feeling the 2016 nostalgia? Six 2016 throwbacks to shop now

So, as 2016 nostalgia grips everyone around me, I am resisting the urge to point out that ten years isn’t that big of a deal when you’ve been around for almost half a century or more. Or that true nostalgia belongs to the 90s, which everyone knows was the best decade of all time, mainly because smartphones hadn’t been invented yet, and when we went to concerts, people waved cigarette lighters and downloaded the memory in their precious memory banks, instead of holding phones aloft and uploading pictures to the Cloud.

'We had to wait a week to watch the next episode of anything!', I want to cry. Of course, it’s as old as the hills that the older generation acts as if they have a monopoly on the past. What I realised this week is that this feeling belongs to everyone. The bittersweet joy of fondly recalling a moment that you now realise has long since passed isn’t only the preserve of those of us in perimenopause or beyond. It might feel too soon to look back ten years to 2016 with misty-eyed wistfulness, but nostalgia is not a competition.

So I've resolved to keep my ‘back in my day…’ anecdotes to myself and let the younger generation's stories unfold without interrupting. Because there’s something almost ritualistic about looking back at a shared moment in time and recognising how much has changed. This is a precious rite of passage, and it’s not my place to point out that my Birkenstocks predate this funny little chapter in history that everyone’s suddenly obsessed with.

If you, too, are feeling dizzy as the waves of nostalgia break all around you, I see you. It feels discombobulating because it is; it reminds us, sometimes sharply, of the fact that we are no longer the young ones. And in a world that idolises and idealises youth, that’s not always a comfortable thought. I heard someone describe this as emotional mileage - instead of scoffing at 2016 nostalgia, as our parents might have dismissed the bands we loved on Top of The Pops as all having been done before, we can simply smile and bear witness to this new wave of women who are realising, perhaps for the first time. that they aren’t as young as they once were.

Welcome to the club. It honestly gets better the longer you're in it.