You’re sitting in the backseat of your mom’s car listening to Tennis Court by Lorde on your neon blue iPhone 5C while scrolling through Tumblr on the internet that Kim Kardashian broke. After looking at enough Peeniss (Peeta and Katniss’s ship name of course) gif sets and a couple justgirlythings posts you click on a link to a Buzzfeed article listing the top-ten-tweets about Solange beating the hell out of Jay-Z in an elevator. Just as you’re about to take a quiz on what Divergent faction you’re in, you arrive at the movie theater for your showing of the Fault in Our Stars. The year was 2014 where Tumblr, warm Instagram filters, thick cat eyes, and young adult novels were all the rage.

This year, 2024, marks a decade since we experienced this culturally iconic time, and as the trend cycle spins faster than ever it’s becoming increasingly relevant to ask: are we experiencing a 2014 renaissance? Or are we just hung up on an old friend named nostalgia?

Despite 2014 being a decade ago now, for many it still feels fresh. Perhaps this is because the prominent social media platforms we used to share our curated posts are still accessible and relevant today. Sure, the youth might have abandoned Tumblr, and Twitter is now X, but the concept of either platform is not foreign nor forgotten. Our 2014 habits weren’t lost in the abyss forever but rather collecting dust in the attic.

A decade later we’ve revisited them without even realizing it and some are starting to take notice. @pidabread on TikTok predicts that by summer there will be a “big lip thing,” reminiscent of a certain EOS lip balm craze of the early 2010s. Having a vast collection of the egg-shaped lip balms was a school-yard status symbol in it of itself. Now the shelves of Sephora’s nationwide are bare of the Summer Fridays lippies and Rhode’s peptide lip treatment online. Rhode’s celebrity founder, Hailey Bieber, has legitimized this connection by posting a photo dump captioned “just girly things” featuring said lip balm. The comments? Fixated on a never-before-seen phone case with a built-in holder for the lip balm, only amplifying the echoes of the past consumerism habits and excitement.

Parallels aside, why exactly are we looking back a decade ago? I don’t think anyone knows for certain, but it is undeniable that we are now entering a time in which we are nostalgic about things that aren’t really gone. Tapping into 2014 is as easy as scrolling to the bottom of someone’s Instagram page or listening to Arctic Monkeys’s AM. It is all still accessible enough to be remembered by the same generation reviving it. We used the internet as a medium for sharing rather than curating not only ourselves, but our interests ,and day-to-day lives. After 2016’s shift towards prioritizing a glamorous facade online, the people yearn to make Instagram “casual” again. 2014 represents a time in which the internet seemed to exist for community and diving into aesthetics for an escape.

With all things considered 2024 taste does not necessarily look like 2014. Slicked back ponytails and 90s-esque brows are ubiquitous, office wear is chic (and not in a business casual in the club kinda way), skincare’s popularity is here to stay, and our eyes are no longer looking towards Hollister and American Eagle, but instead SSENSE and Goodwill. Skinny jeans are frowned upon and I wish I could say I see elements of Twee coming back but Zooey Deschanel will just have to sit this one out. We’ve seen other feminine styles like the coquette aesthetic take hold in the new decade—in humor and on the runway. Sandy Liang’s infamous use of bows in her designs has taken Pinterest boards by storm, and the fashion industry has taken notice. Coach, Acne Studios, and Dilara Findikoglu (to name a few) have all incorporated the simple knot in their latest collections.

Will we look back at this in ten years and laugh? Who knows. We had fun wearing flower crowns then and we’re having fun with bows now. That sense of fun we united around was something so quintessential to 2014 and with hindsight as our guide we can take notes from a decade ago to define this year in our own way.

Reach column writer Jackson Simonsmeier at musemediauw@gmail.com Instagram @jackson.sim