Who among us hasn’t noticed the creep of nineties looks, sounds and smells over the past few years? I mean, who doesn’t love rocking out to Nirvana in a halter top and butterfly hairclips, smelling of the latest Impulse scent? But what is it that has drawn our attention back to this time of punk music vs boy bands?

Nostalgia is the easy response, and it makes sense. Workers in their 30s and 40s, people with disposable incomes, were tweens and teens in the 90s. Their bucks follow their interests, and it is easy to grab those dollars with a nostalgic 90s feel. Not to mention, Generation X are the parents of today’s tweens and teens. Surely every parent has experienced their teenager ‘finding’ the cool album/t-shirt/artwork that was in their house the whole time? So it makes sense that cultural moments follow those with the disposable income.

Teenagers quote Friends at school, wearing faux-vintage band t-shirts and coating themselves in fruity scents. Walking through a shopping centre, you are likely to run into a tween version of at least one Spice Girl. In so many ways, it is comforting, amusing, and familiar. Are there any downsides?

Revisiting media from previous decades can be so much fun. 20s flapper dresses, 50s cocktails, 70s hippies, 80s hair; we love a good dress up! The problem arises when we revisit that historical moment without critical thinking.

Those fun decades of wacky hairdos, glitzy outfits and awesome music had some messed-up ideas going on. Racism was not only accepted, it was enshrined in law. Young men were conscripted into the defensive forces against their will, women did not have equal anything, and a whole host of other ‘backwards’ ways dominated. And it is impossible to separate those ideas from the media of the time, because it is our media that simultaneously reflects and shapes culture.

Let’s look at an example.

Friends is a popular as ever, with the show finding new watchers every day. However, it is a show of its time in every way. In the golden age of sitcoms, Friends was the king of the one-liners and enduring sexual tension (they were on a break!). When looking back with nostalgia it is easy to skip past the gay-panic jokes, transphobic treatment of Chandler’s parent and complete lack of diversity. Set in New York City, a hub of immigration for hundreds of years, it is hard to believe that six young workers would have so few interactions with people from different cultural backgrounds. Even those characters portrayed by people of colour lacked any exploration of cultural difference. Ross, Joey and Chandler’s knee-jerk response to any sort of male affection or suggestion of male-male attraction accurately portrays the dominate attitude at the time of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Even Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman has since expressed regret for the treatment of Chandler’s trans parent.

As I have caught episodes over the years, these issues have become more and more jarring. I like to believe it is because our societal views have progressed (at least a little).

Enjoying media from the nineties is fantastic, I do and I hope you do too! The problem arises when we enjoy it uncritically. Friends was and is a fantastic TV show. It speaks to a lot of people around the world, entertaining and bringing joy; just like Seinfeld and Titanic and NSYNC and so many other phenomena from the decade of body glitter and oversized tracksuits. As we bring forward our beloved elements, we just need to remember; some of the nineties attitudes should be left back there.