Turning decades into aesthetics is nothing new for pop culture. Nostalgia is a powerful reminder of a more comfortable, simpler time, a time when things just seemed familiar and easy to live by. The drug of nostalgia runs deep online with mood boards and baiting posts for Generation Z and millennials.
With the 2016 online trend, this search for nostalgia has turned into a full-blown wish for its revival. Every decade seems to have something of the sort that shapes it into a revival. The Y2K revival of the turn of the century was no different. Still bleeding into our culture today, your local Urban Outfitters has been appealing to decade aesthetics for years, while H&M is just catching up.
To older generations, 2016 seems monumentally less iconic than something like the 2000s. However, someone who lived through the year as a preteen could tell you that the year had quite its own distinguishing markers.
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Dabbing, fidget spinners, NikkiTutorials eyeshadow art, Uggs, and above all, the Starbucks unicorn frappuccino — an incredibly convoluted, saccharine drink making its taste and steps in brewing contribute heavily to its discontinuation — all other items mentioned can be brought back, besides the frappe. But what is 2016 without its drink? Its absence would be obvious, so much so that the internet was demanding its return.
“People have asked for the unicorn frappe,” Norah Thurow, a third-year University of Iowa student who works at the Iowa Memorial Union Starbucks location, said. “They’ve also asked it in almost a cowardly way — asking for a vanilla frappe with raspberry in it.”
Every good revival needs a soundtrack, too. For the 1960s-70s medieval revival, Fleetwood Mac held high. PinkPantheress was hosting Y2K. And now, for this 2016 comeback, we have Zara Larsson.
Larsson’s carefree Malibu-Barbie aesthetic was discovered from a well-circulated dolphin meme that uses her 2016 song “Symphony.” This, along with her new 2025 album “Midnight Sun” and her feature on PinkPantheress’s “Stateside,” helped launch her into being the music behind the movement.
While the fishy frutiger aero of the tropics and inky primary colors are more reminiscent of late 2000s airbrush T-shirts, Larsson’s look instantly reminds me of 2016 iconography. Think the overly saturated posts of the pink beaches of Bali, along with the chokehold the Instagram filter “Rio De Janeiro” has on every story.
These revivals are influenced by music and pop culture, but they are also influenced by the current political climate of the world. There is a common consensus online that things after the COVID-19 pandemic never felt the same.
In 2016, things felt freer from the worries the post-pandemic world has been filled with. For people like me who were too young to fully take advantage of this, the hiraeth for this exhilaration in life is not only fun, but kind of a deeper longing. It’s no wonder that the era of no worries and fun begs to be resurfaced.
Want to know the best way to participate in the trend? Just scroll through your phone and find some defining pictures of you and what you were up to in 2016. Or just ask your parents, they have one somewhere on their Facebook page.