If you’ve been paying attention to trends in music, fashion, and lifestyles over the past few years, you may notice that everything is seeming a little…groovier lately. Oranges and sage greens are coming back into style, makeup is becoming more natural, and music is getting easier and easier to dance to.
What made me realize this fully, though, was the release of Harry Styles’ newest album, “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally” this past week. Obviously, the title has disco in it, but all the imagery and promotional material around the album has a distinct 70s feel to it. The advanced listening parties looked like something straight out of Studio 54, and it made me realize something; are we back in the 70s?
If you pay attention to fashion trends from the last 25 years, you can see that almost all of them correlate with decades that have passed us by. The early 00s leaned heavily on the maximalism of the 80s, the early 2010s reflected trends of the 50s and 60s, and the early 20s have gone back to the 90s with dark colors and baggier silhouettes. However, one decade has been left out; the 70s. While I loved the 70s and its fashion while I was in high school, often wearing bellbottoms and denim to school, this wasn’t a major trend that happened. The closest we got was flared leggings, and I’d hardly call that a resurgence of 70s trends.
However, this album has already seemed to signal a shift in trends for the masses. Photo boards of concert outfits for Harry Styles’ NYC residency lean heavily on club and disco trends of the 70s, 70s music like Fleetwood Mac, Village Men, and Donna Summer have been trending on TikTok, and I’ve even seen people start to popularize makeup trends like glitter eyeshadow and Twiggy lashes (which are a 60s trend but leaked into the 70s).
However, this doesn’t answer the question of why the 70s are trending? Why is this the decade that we’ve decided to make popular? Is it a planned thing, or is it just a set of coincidences?
Personally, I think it’s a mix of the two. Maybe we’ve decided that this is the perfect time to bring back the 70s, but it also might have something to do with the political climate of the country. We’re in the middle of a recession right now, similar to the 70s, and fast fashion is reigning supreme. There was also fast fashion in the 70s, coming from order by mail magazines, similar to how apps like Shein and Depop work today.
I think the 70s were also a time of severe idealism, something that we’re looking for now. Everything was about dancing, family values, and the music of the time, and that’s eerily similar today. The traditional “nuclear family” is being advertised more than ever today, music is part of every aspect of our lives, and dancing. The entirety of Styles’ album is about dancing, even he said so himself.
I think that the 70s are here to stay, at least for this decade, and it’s simply because of the similarities between now and then. There are far too many things we want to take our minds off of, and that correlates to the way we use our media as a distraction. Instead of Disco, Occasionally, our world today asks us to Disco all the Time, and by using the 70s as our template, we’ve been doing that to the best of our ability.
