Nostalgia consumption

[5] At the second level, the individual starts raising questions concerning the truth of the nostalgic claim, then entering in the third one by going beyond the issues of historical accuracy into a deeper analysis.

Anyway, this nostalgia could turn into a utopian vision of the past since "an individual's idealized perception of it automatically erases any negative traces".

[3] This dualistic vision is still present in contemporary societies, even if today these two elements seem to coexist: patina has been recuperated in simulated forms, created through mass-production, such as artificially aged items.

This new dimension of consumption is enriched by a "modern hedonism", described by Campbell as a private state of the mind through which goods become the results of human creativity and fantasy.

[7] This "(re-)enchantment", at the base of the previously described modern hedonism, is described as the "recovery of utopian, romantic, mythical, emotional, and imaginary elements of the relationship consumers have with the world".

As a result of their experiment, the researchers found out that a past-themed consumption can create (re-)enchantment by eliciting different kinds of nostalgia, as explained in the following lines.

In the 1970s, movies such as Grease and American Graffiti started a trend in entertainment content production that was based on arousing nostalgia for an earlier decade in consumers of the Baby boom generation.

[13] However, Charles Fairchild, associate professor of popular music at the University of Sydney, disputes that concept and label stating that[14] “You can have nostalgia for things you haven’t directly experienced.

There’s a shared experience that gives people a vivid and immediate connection, and that’s what the Kate Bush song has done.”Younger generations have faced disruptions in education, job markets, and cost of living, leading them to seek solace in pre-social media eras.