Every summer leading into the upcoming NBA season, each team gets to unveil new designs for their annual “city edition” jerseys, showcasing how each team will temporarily change up their look on a select few handful of nights over the course of the season.

This year, a record number of teams favored a new creative route: throwbacks. A record 15 teams announced that they’d be reverting back to jersey designs their teams donned back in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s. Whether it be that exactly 50% of the league’s design teams independently developed this idea or the league deliberately organized for a wave of throwbacks to hit the hardwood, it’s still an indicator of increasing interest in aesthetics and fashion from the past.

What’s more: This pursuit was a huge success. The Basketball Jersey Archive’s “Top & Flop” feature, which allows users to manually score each new jersey out of five stars, concluded that eight of the top nine new City Edition jersey designs fell into the category of vintage throwbacks, while none of the bottom nine “flops” captured anything retro.

It’s apparent in broader contexts, too—history tells us that these fashion cycles are nothing uncommon. The “20-year fashion cycle” is a well-documented theory that claims that the masses will begin to view older trends and media as nostalgic once twenty years have passed. A revitalization of this culture will then ensue, prompted by a generation who likely wasn’t  around to experience this era’s original rendition. These aesthetics get recontextualized for a newer generation, who then merge modern phenomenons with what once was.

Y2K fashion aesthetics, for example, have been the subject of a sudden rebirth precisely in accordance with the twenty-year grace period that this theory offers us. This shift in aesthetic came about in the late nineties to encapsulate society’s excitement  for the turn of the century, and often featured apparel that felt futuristic, bold, bright, and busy as a reflection of this sentiment. It’s current comeback isn’t centered around this same wide-eyed anticipation; we now all live in a world where we are well accustomed to these impending “futuristic” developments and the early impacts they’ve had in shifting society. While initially rooted in futurism, these aesthetics have grown vintage. This is the inevitable recontextualization when a phenomenon once again rears its head. No trend returns as a carbon copy of its original form. 

Even in spite of all this, there is still something unique about the degree to which young adults of today are willing to embrace anything “vintage.” Some have critiqued how this desire to travel back reduces our capacity to move forward artistically, with music critic Simon Reynolds being among those at the forefront of this discussion. “There has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past,” he wrote in his 2010 book Retromania. In 2022, VICE life columnist Hannah Ewens asked readers “why are we constantly revisiting the past in music, fashion, and pop culture? How did we get trapped in a self-imposed time capsule machine.”

These critiques came amidst a string of new radio hits coming about that almost entirely relied on “sampling” older classics with very little reimagining of what these original pieces did. From Nick Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girls,” to Drake’s “Way 2 Sexy,” a sudden wave of chart toppers artificially capitalizing off of this heightened demand for sounds from the past made it difficult to pinpoint what today’s top music did to define this era of art. 

Ewen’s article cites TikTok and social media at large as the primary culprit. While nostalgia cycles are nothing new, our screens now offer us access into any world or culture we wish to dip our toes into. Never before have the masses had access to such a broad and diverse range of media, all of which is being platformed and special-delivered to us on our social media app of choice via its hyper-personalized algorithm. We are now able to build community and see ourselves in people and cultures we have never been a part of in real life. The consequences of this can be culture becoming an aesthetic adopted by appropriators that, instead of living and experiencing the lifestyle that such a culture sprouted from, are instead wearing it as an accessory. The more common this becomes, the more the heart of a culture is extracted from its very core.

The vastness of social media has also made these trends, as Ewens puts it, “disorienting.” Its ability to give anybody a voice has brought us away from the days of prevailing industry voices dictating what’s heard and what’s popular. These days, a song can achieve millions of plays and never once be played on the radio. Trends are quick to come and go, and countless niche cultural subgroups now exist as opposed to a cohesive “mainstream.” This makes it difficult to pinpoint where this era is at artistically, because in many ways it is everywhere. As a byproduct of this, designers and consumers both have grown more attracted to the more tangible and identifiable era indicators present in retro and vintage apparel.

Another additional contributor to this design phenomenon has been this generation’s increasing awareness of pressing climate concerns and the harmful nature of traditional fast fashion. While replicates of vintage clothing are commonplace, a good chunk of what grows popular during one of these “vintage cycles” are pre-made pieces or designs hand-crafted by independent designers or teams. This makes shopping vintage a much more sustainable and eco-friendly counter to fast fashion, an industry that current generations have felt more compelled to combat given the stranglehold it has on the fashion market today more than ever.

To conclude, vintage design has seen a resurgence for a variety of reasons. Part of its rebirth is a simple inevitability evidenced by the 20-year nostalgia theory, while other aspects of its rise can be attributed to the increasing prominence of social media and the looming climate crisis raising the consciousness of consumers. Fears of experiencing cultural stagnation as a result are largely unfounded, even with this contemporary embrace of the past being among the most significant history has seen. Like they always have, creative and effective designers are finding ways to advance vintage apparel forward by building on the foundations established by their predecessors. While cheap replications will always exist, time will end up ultimately being the sole judge for how this era is defined artistically.