It's 2024 but it might as well be 2014. King Kylie has finally returned, the Tumblr aesthetic is dominating TikTok, and Instagram is forcing users to relive the glory days of the celebrity selfie. Get happy! Or fancy. Or rude.
The minutiae of the 2014 aesthetics' return has been explored at length but this Instagram angle is a new wrinkle. By mid-January 2024, various users' Instagram Explore Pages began filling up with vintage celebrity photos circa mid-10s. We're talking 2016 Selena Gomez and 2017 Tom Holland.
Is this Explore Page situation exclusive to the celeb-obsessed? Not really; only a couple folks in the Highsnobiety office were affected but none of them followed or engaged with many celebrities.
A handful of Twitter users noticed a similar trend on their own Explore pages, as Instagram began showing them various celebrity pictures from the past six years.
It's an inexplicable shift born of Instagram's inscrutable algorithm. It won't show you the things that your friends posted yesterday but it will reshare decade-old Kardashian selfies. Go figure.
No one outside of Instagram will ever know exactly why this happened but you can theorize. And it does follow that as the 2014 Tumblr era is popularized, as the King Kylie era again becomes our era, there emerges a heightened interest in returning to old celebrity photos.
Perhaps there are simply enough people reliving these nostalgic old posts that Instagram's algorithm has interpreted this as renewed demand and, thus, the recirculation began. An ouroboros of content, The Time Traveler's Wife retold for a contemporary audience except this time the relationship is parasocial.
The 2014 revival has been a thing for years but today's fixation could, arguably, be traced to Addison Rae's first post of 2024, an instantly decade-old selfie.
But, really, nostalgia is the true culprit.
With the distance of a decade, everything seems better, especially in our economically jumpy, consistently conspiratorial, and overwhelmingly online times. Don't the irony-free pre-Trump days sound so simple, so sweet by comparison?
Even photos from 2016 and 2017 reflect an easier, pre-COVID-19 moment in history.
Heavily filtered photos of Khloe Kardashian's regrettable hairdos and Zayn canoodling with Gigi are tangible representations of past moments infinitely more authentic than today's poised celeb photos.
They're appealing for the same reason as famous people's old tweets: it's not just what they're saying, it's that a household name is saying it.
Well, maybe it's sometimes also what they're saying. Happy 10th anniversary to Kylie's best tweet!
These retro celebrity selfies are indicative of a bigger trend and overarching desires.
That they've resurfaced is the closest thing to tangible evidence, besides the 100 million or so views of a TikTok hashtag, that the year is actually 2014, not 2024. This means that 2015 is only 5 months away — let that sink in.
