Remember when, at the start of the year, the internet became intensely nostalgic for 2016? Well now, just a couple of months later, I'm already feeling faintly nostalgic for that nostalgia. The pink-filtered TikToks, the Zara Larsson comeback, the passionate debates about whether Pokémon Go represented peak civilisation (it did). It all felt rather warm while it lasted.Just in case you missed it: the '2026 is the new 2016' trend swept social media in January, with the hashtag #BringBack2016 sending searches for '2016' up 452% on TikTok and millions of people sharing decade-old selfies through a hazy, oversaturated filter that made everything look like a Snapchat memory. It peaked, as design trends do, and then it moved on.But for creatives, the interesting stuff isn't the trend itself: it's what it was actually about. And that hasn't gone away.
