Yhem Speaks

What the ’80s photo trend is trying to tell us...

The internet has collectively decided that we all belong in the 1980s. If you’ve opened any social feed over the last few days, your screen has undoubtedly been flooded with an endless sea of denim jackets, leather collars, perfectly styled big hair, and those distinctively faded studio backdrops. Suddenly, everyone you know looks less like they are sitting at a boring modern desk typing out emails, and more like they just walked off a classic movie set, stepped straight out of a high school yearbook or are about to drop a platinum record.

I must admit, some of these pictures are making a very strong case for time travel. There is an undeniable magnetism to them. The fashion is loud, the poses are deliberate and above all, there is a striking sense of presence. Everyone suddenly looks like they have a record deal, a magazine cover, or a starring role in a film. You look at people you see every day in real life, and in these retro frames, they look entirely different. They look solid. They look like they belong exactly where they are standing.

The funny thing is that when I first started seeing these photos, I was looking out for the fashion, the jackets and hairstyles. Instead, I noticed something beyond that. It was how confident everybody looked. Not the curated confidence in the modern sense posted at the perfect time of the day. I mean people being genuinely comfortable in their own skin.

But as I continue scrolling through this endless parade of digital nostalgia, a question keeps coming to mind: Why are we all so obsessed with this specific look right now? What is it about a decade that many of us didn’t even live through or only remember in fragments that makes us feel so homesick? I think the answer has very little to do with the actual clothes or the vintage lighting and everything to do with how exhausting it has become to exist online today.

Let’s be honest about the world we live in right now. Everything feels like an unspoken competition. When we post a photo today, it rarely feels simple. We are constantly aware of how we are being perceived. We worry about finding the perfect, clean aesthetic. We double-check the lighting, we smooth out the background and we carefully curate a version of our lives that looks successful, polished and effortless. We filter our realities because we feel the heavy weight of everyone else’s filtered realities pressing down on us. It is a non-stop game of comparison, and it leaves us all feeling a little bit unsure, a little bit filtered and a little bit fake.

But when you look at those ’80s pictures circulating everywhere, that entire modern pressure cooker that is obvious now, completely vanishes. It might be because people then didn’t have a global audience watching them every day like now… I guess.

I also noticed there was an unapologetic realness to how people carried themselves back then. Nobody was thinking about building a “personal brand” or creating a flawless Instagram grid. If you had messy hair, you owned it. If your outfit was loud and colorful, you wore it with pride. The confidence wasn’t something people manufactured through an editing app after the photo was taken; it was a baseline setting. It was the absolute freedom of not caring if you looked a little ridiculous, as long as you looked like you.

Today, we have the most advanced, hyper-perfect camera technology in human history inside our pockets. We can capture our lives in terrifyingly flawless clarity. Yet, we are collectively using this brilliant modern technology just to strip away our crisp, perfect reality. We want the soft edges. We want the slight blur. We want the warmth.

Think about how we interact with memories now. We take fifty photos of a single dinner just to get one where nobody is blinking and the lighting hits perfectly. We delete the mistakes instantly. But the ’80s aesthetic reminds us of a time when the mistakes were the memory. You went to a photo studio, you sat in front of a blue laser background, you struck a bold pose and whatever came out of that camera was exactly who you were. There was no safety net of a “delete” button. Strangely… knowing there was no backspace gave people a raw, fearless certainty. They leaned into the camera because they had nothing to hide and no online competition to beat.

That is why everyone in these pictures looks like a star. They aren’t trying to look richer, thinner or more exclusive than their neighbors. They are just occupying their space in the world with total, unshakeable comfort. When we copy that retro look today, we aren’t just playing dress-up with old fashion trends. Deep down, I think we are all just trying to borrow a little bit of that unapologetic spirit. We are looking for a pocket of time where we don’t have to compete, where we don’t have to look perfect and where we can just stand in our own shoes without second-guessing ourselves. Whether the pictures are entirely accurate to what the decade actually felt like day-to-day doesn’t really matter. One thing is certain; the ’80s knew how to make an entrance.

Maybe, just for a few minutes while we scroll through our feeds and laugh at the big hair and the dramatic poses, we can also remember how to make an entrance in our own lives by realizing that the best thing we can bring into any room isn’t a flawless, highly competitive image but rather just the raw, honest confidence to be entirely, unapologetically present and be you.

I hope we all borrow some confidence from the ’80s this season.

With Stories Always,

Yhem 💕