By Tom O'Kelly, Senior Research Manager
Gen Z are dressing like it is 1997. Past franchises are being remade, rebooted or resurrected for a fourth or fifth time. Vinyl, film cameras and dumbphones are being sold to people who never used them the first time round. Nostalgia is not a niche taste at the moment. It is one of the dominant forces shaping culture, and it is worth asking why.
Part of the answer is straightforward. People find comfort in the familiar, especially content tied to childhood or adolescence. But the timing and intensity of the current trend suggest something more specific is happening. Culture keeps returning to the same well because audiences keep rewarding it when it does.
I write all of this as someone who regularly wears a Star Wars, Pokémon or Lord of the Rings T-shirt to work, so I clearly don't see commercialised nostalgia as a bad thing. But I do wonder why it has taken such mainstream hold over people who didn't experience these things first time round. Is it a method of escape? Do I wear these T-shirts to subtly undermine the seriousness of my day-to-day life (yes)? Or is something more emotional driving the trend?
Let's look at the latest UK data from GWI, which helps explain what nostalgia looks like in practice, and who is actually driving it.
Source: GWI Core, UK, Q1 to Q2 2026. Base: all UK internet users (55.1 million). Index shows how far above the national average that age group's engagement runs; 100 is average.
These behaviours split roughly into two camps. The first is passive and personal: listening to old music, looking at old photos. These are also the most common forms of nostalgia across the population. The second is active and participatory: replaying old games, buying collectibles, following fan content, subscribing to creators who specialise in retro content. This is where the more interesting pattern shows up. Engagement with the active forms concentrates heavily among 16-to-24-year-olds, who are more than twice as likely as the average UK adult to play games from their childhood, follow franchise fan content, watch retro creators or buy toys and collectibles for themselves. Younger adults aren't passively encountering recycled culture. They're actively collecting, replaying and building communities around content tied to their own very recent childhoods.
What's interesting is when we look at the motivations driving this.
Source: GWI Core, UK, Q1 to Q2 2026. Base: UK internet users who engage with nostalgic interests.
The strongest motivation is relaxation, followed closely by reconnecting with personal identity. A third simply rate the quality of the content, old or not. Only 18% describe it as an escape from current news and culture, which is worth noting given how often escapism gets assumed to be the primary driver. On this evidence, nostalgia is less an avoidance mechanism and more a genuine source of comfort, identity and enjoyment in its own right.
That resonates with my own behaviour. My identity has a huge attachment to nostalgic content, and I'll openly acknowledge my childish nerd tendencies right before diving into an intense rant about the socioeconomic situation in the wizarding world throughout the Harry Potter books (If you know, you know.)
So what?
This isn't just an excuse for me to examine my own behaviour, it has a direct implication for communications professionals. Wider consumer data shows 54% of UK adults want brands to be authentic and 52% like seeing brands bring back old logos or adverts. Yet only 25% want brands to be traditional.
The appetite for the old imagery is real. What audiences aren't asking for is a return to how brands used to operate: the pace, the tone, the values that came attached to that era. They want the look of the past delivered through the standards of today.
This is exactly what reboot culture demonstrates. A franchise revival keeps its title and most recognisable features, characters, iconography, the name itself, while rebuilding everything underneath: production, narrative, casting, tone. That's why the same playbook produces wildly different results. Some revivals land, others feel cynical, and the difference comes down to whether the update understands what audiences actually valued about the original, or whether it is just trying to ride the coattails of nostalgic success.
The same principle applies to comms. Nostalgia isn't simply reverting to old stuff. It's a design resource, a set of aesthetic and emotional toolkits, deployed through modern executions that stay true to the brand. This matters most with younger audiences. Their interest in nostalgia isn't a wish to live in the past. They're selecting, remixing and repurposing familiar culture as part of their current identity, and comms built on old references without that understanding will miss them entirely.
The question isn't “what can we bring back?” It's “what does this still mean to our audience today?”