6 hours ago
9
‘I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” wrote TS Eliot in 1915, in his seminal poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. And as I sit here in 2026 with my jeans turned up (as per the style of the thirtysomething urban millennial), well, I can relate. What has brought on this bout of contemplation? The latest TikTok craze. Loosely known as “Bring Back 2016”, it involves TikTokers urging their mostly gen Z audience to “live 2026 like it’s 2016” – complete with mannequin challenges, a Major Lazer soundtrack and the promise of never-ending summer. And it’s sure to get heads spinning quicker than the fidget spinners it’s resurrecting.
Admittedly, most of the content is just plain silly: 2016 challenges and dances (the bottle flip, the dab); nostalgia for tech crazes (Pokémon Go and that Snapchat dog filter that made you look like a slobbering puppy but in a weirdly sexy way); and a return to 2016 makeup, fashion and low-effort aesthetics. Remember when “vintage film” filters were all the rage (RIP Instagram’s Mayfair and Sierra)? When videos didn’t need a number of takes, lengthy edits, and border on a professional production? When it was OK to just be online without considering what it said about you as a personal brand? Or when the internet wasn’t divisive politics everywhere? Well, that’s 2016 according to TikTok, and it’s time to “Bring! It! Back!”
There will be some of us who will find this retelling strange, or tantamount to a large-scale trolling of everyone over 30 (is there any greater pain then seeing people use the #vintagemakeup hashtag for a 2016 makeup tutorial?). You may even be considering ripping up your skinny jeans in protest (careful though; ripped skinny jeans is allegedly a 2016 look). But let me remind you that romanticising bygone eras is part and parcel of youthful retro fun.
We’ve probably all done it. It’s especially easy when you weren’t there in the first place. I didn’t grow up in the 80s but in my 20s I sure liked to dress as if I was from a John Carpenter movie – which is funny because many of those characters were dressing up as if they were in the 1950s, which they wouldn’t have been around for either. And if you’ve ever bought mid-century-modern-inspired furniture, you too have bought a curated fantasy of the 60s and 70s that suits our current tastes – it’s always slim silhouettes and teak, and never wall-to-wall shag carpets and everything made out of worryingly flammable synthetic materials, even though you probably were smoking on it.
So who cares if all this is slightly inaccurate? Surely, it doesn’t matter that vintage film filters were considered cringe by 2014, when the #nofilter hashtag took off? Or that by 2013 there were plenty of memorable internet pile-ons that cemented the high stakes of internet life (Jon Ronson wrote a whole book about it in 2015)? As for politics, I suspect this is an American take – 2016 being the year before the deeply polarising Trump presidency began. Clearly, here in Britain, we were ahead of the curve on social division, having held the Brexit referendum in June 2016. And David Bowie died (he was the glue that held us all together).
But we’re not trading in accuracies; we’re trading in vibes, and this “2016 on TikTok” vibe does sound good.
Except I can’t seem to shake the feeling that it’s also all a bit sad. It’s not the same as romanticising an age that you weren’t in, because these TikTokers were in it. Indeed, if you read the hashtags and captions as much as I did (“#thegoodolddays”, “the best year of our lives” etc), a different message rises to the top: that 2016 was the last good year this generation experienced. The last year before “unprecedented times”. The last year of optimism. A particularly heartbreaking theme is seeing all the content reminiscing about Pokémon Go and how “crazy” it was that people were spending their weekends outside, and actual strangers would talk to each other! Call me soppy, but people in their mid-20s feeling that their best years are behind them, sounding like pensioners, is very depressing.
The question is what we rolled-up trouser folk are going to do about it. And while the bigger troubles for gen Z – house prices, job market, debt – might be out of our hands, perhaps making the internet a little kinder is something to which we can contribute. Give praise in public. Starve cruelty of oxygen by choosing not to pile on. And for the truly bold, lead by example: be playful, be unpolished, be earnest, be cringe – if not for ourselves then for da kidz (see? I’m doing it right now!). We’ve done it before, we can do it again! Make 2026 2016? Pffft, forget that! Make 2026 2026! Make it a year we all want to remember.
