Why Am I So Obsessed With ’90s Nostalgia on Instagram?
Instagram is many things to many people: a wonderland of Kardashian birthday party pics, and a forum on which to sell (and indeed feud over) gummy vitamins. But at its best, to me, it is a sublime time warp to the ’90s, the simpler era of my childhood and teen years. Thanks to deeply nostalgic, and impressively popular, accounts like @90sAnxiety (513,000 followers) and @90sMilk (199,00 followers), my Instagram feed routinely doubles as a portal to the days when TLC ruled the red carpet, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were still together, and, um, Paul Rudd looked exactly the same as he does today. Like bodysuits, combat boots, and scrunchies on the wrists of millennials, the peak celebrities—and couples—of the ’90s are alive again on Instagram, in all of their angsty glory.
Nineties nostalgia Instagram has sucked me in—along with hundreds of thousands of others—with all the addictive power of a Madonna hook. “I follow, basically, any account that is going to show me celebrities with chunky highlights, thin eyebrows, and brown lipstick,” comedian and TV writer Alison Leiby told Vogue. At @90sMilk (tagline: “a timeless mood board”) and @90sAnxiety, every day is Throwback Thursday, allowing the grown adults of today to visually travel back to their emo youth, the 2019 equivalent of making collages clipped from the pages of YM, Jane, Bop and Sassy.
“Even when I look back at a picture of a 25-year-old Winona Ryder, she still feels older than 35-year-old-me is right now,” Leiby said. “It’s all so aspirational.” Twenty-two years after her death, Princess Diana reigns as queen of street style stars in this corner of the instagram: The proliferation of posts of her leaving the gym may be singlehandedly responsible for the fashion revival of bike shorts.
Sometimes ’90s nostalgia accounts remind me of things I forgot, or maybe I never knew at all—like Aniston flicking off the paparazzi (quoth one commenter: “Ross must have said they were on a break again”), or Jared Leto and Cameron Diaz making out in Paris in 1999, with him wearing a bucket hat. I grew up a faithful reader of The Star and National Enquirer, with issues splayed out on my grandma’s coffee table, but I was a junior in high school back then, probably too busy listening to Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” and reeling tearfully through a breakup with my older boyfriend to catch these momentous events. Plus, Instagram (and Twitter) didn’t exist back then—we were left to rely solely on tabloids, celebrity weeklies, and nightly viewings of Entertainment Tonight for updates. Some young millennials are finding out for the first time, via Instagram, that Pitt once dated Gwyneth Paltrow, and that they tooled around the West Village together in matching haircuts.
Other times, ’90s accounts provide welcome pop-cultural context. On the day last month when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s son, Archie, was born, @90sMilk, run by Courtney Nunes, a British university student who—take a deep breath, Gen X—admits she “did not experience the ’90s at all” posted an achingly cute photo of 3-year-old Prince Harry on his first day of school, a tender reminder of the fact that the world has watched the royal’s entire life cycle thus far. Amid the endless buzz swirling around Markle, Nunes shared a throwback to the duchess’s 1998 California prom photo (in a hint of foreshadowing, she was queen).
”Anything that shows a less tamed, or less glamorous, version of a celebrity really interests the audience,” Nunes says.
Instagramming the ’90s two decades later reveals just how raw, and truly off duty, celebrities seemed then—in stark contrast with the highly styled, tightly controlled norm of today. “At the Oscars, they wouldn’t even photograph celebrities’ feet, because they didn’t care. It wasn’t about who you were wearing and who styled you,” says Julie Stone, a veteran photo researcher for Glamour who now runs the celeb Instagram account @obviousbutamazing2, which includes throwback pics of Pitt and Aniston, and Luke Perry. “Some people would even go to red carpet events not wearing makeup.”
Looking back at the ’90s on Instagram, “we’re reliving that prime,” Stone says. “We don’t have a royal family here, so movie stars are our royal family.”
And 14 years after their divorce, Aniston and Pitt remain the “holy grail,” popping up incessantly in ’90s nostalgia accounts. “The biggest movie star in Hollywood and the biggest TV star in Hollywood fell in love. That’s insane,” Stone says, attempting to explain the enduring appeal. In 2019 speak, “it would be like if Leonardo DiCaprio and Taylor Swift got married,” she says.
Even as she documents present-day celebrities—Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth are favorites for their ’90s-esque free-spiritedness—Stone sprinkles in shots of Aniston and Pitt. “I include them because I find vintage pictures compelling and fascinating. I used to look at pics of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot,” Stone says. “Now the vintage is Christina Applegate and Matthew Perry.”
Applegate is as relevant as ever with her current show, Dead to Me. But in the ’90s nostalgia space on Instagram, she is immortalized as the feathery-haired blonde then best known as Kelly on Married . . . With Children—a show Nunes of @90sMilk quite possibly has never seen.
“It’s a time that feels so close,” Nunes says of the era, “yet it’s actually quite a long time ago.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
