Measles was eradicated in the Americas, Beyoncé created “Lemonade,” and liberal hopes were high for the first female president. Voters were encouraged to Pokémon Go at the polls. Do you remember 2016?
A decade later, celebrities and laypeople alike are sharing fond memories of 2016, the era of face baking and #ImWithHer, when some of the biggest national dramas pitted Kim Kardashian against Taylor Swift.
It was also a sadly terrible year. The Pulse nightclub massacre became the deadliest mass shooting in United States history (until the following year). Prince and David Bowie are dead, among other lost treasures. Political schisms deepened and common ground collapsed. The foundations for an already dystopian 2026 have been laid. How dark is the present?
Many women who were very famous in 2016 have shared photos from their past online, reminding their followers how much more famous they have become since then. Kylie Jenner, who in 2016 was the queen of Tumblr and the exposed pout, commemorated the launch of the lip kit that helped make her a billionaire. Model Karlie Kloss recalls wearing choker necklaces and using the Snapchat puppy filter, a true relic of the mid-2010s. Lena Dunham, a member of Kloss’ Taylor Swift team, recalled filming “Girls.” And in between behind-the-scenes shots of “Big Little Lies,” Reese Witherspoon also snuck in a 2016 photo of herself with Swift.
Then, the gushing. Celebrities and non-famous people alike remember 2016 as a more carefree, even happier, time. Jeans were tighter, eyebrows thicker. This has inspired some to return to or try on this 2016 aesthetic as a costume in the present.
“I loved that time and all my memories from that time, so I had to post!” Mindy Kaling captioned an Instagram carousel of herself in vibrant outfits from her “The Mindy Project” days. Longtime tech YouTuber iJustine commented on another creator’s post: “2016 has been so awesome!!!!”
“I don’t think we’ve ever left 2016,” bohemian brand Free People’s Instagram account added (and based on its consistently Coachella-themed offerings, that might be true).
Although this trend is relatively innocent, there is also “revisionist history,” said Jessica Maddox, an associate professor who teaches media and cultural studies at the University of Georgia.
Maddox shared photos from 2016 to remind her old friends and new followers that she spent the year in a cast on her hand after nearly splitting her thumb in two. It was fun, she said, to present a brief but crucial chapter in her life story to people who only met her after the hand trauma. But he doesn’t miss it.
“Nostalgia is always complicated because we think that by doing or consuming something we can get the same feeling we had back then, which can never be the case,” she said.
Photos from 2016 TO DO Let’s go back to a “simpler” time, when social media felt more like a real network or community, Maddox said. People were more likely to follow the same stories, participate in or make fun of the same trends (model challenge or millennial pink, anyone?) and discuss the same TV date. The makeup was heavier, the camera lenses grainier, the styling maximalist (although at least two of those trends could come back into favor). In 2016, Maddox said, “we were less online but at the same time more together in the spaces where we were online.”
“Our media diets were also very different: we weren’t constantly bombarded with bad news, whether it was politics or being constantly plugged into the media,” she said. “I think that’s part of the reason we look back and think it was easier or better, probably just because we weren’t plugged in as much and we weren’t as online, doing as much doom scrolling. We weren’t really engaged like we are now.”
“When we talk about missing 2016, I think that’s what we miss the most: It definitely felt like we had more of a monoculture back then in terms of where we congregated on the internet,” Maddox said.
It’s this precious, fleeting mix of having a good time on the internet and leaving your phone off long enough to enjoy real life that has inspired some to declare 2016 the “last good year.”
“When people talk about ‘last good year,’ I feel like what we’re really saying is that it was the last time before there was a seismic shift in American politics,” Maddox said.
Recontextualizing the year as the last time things were good “finds comfort in the culture of 2016 as a sort of last moment of joy before the politics of our time overwhelm the culture,” said Dustin Kidd, a sociology professor and pop culture expert at Temple University.
The US presidential election was not the only significant political event of the year. The Brexit vote took the United Kingdom out of the European Union, destabilizing the continent’s political order and polarizing Britons. The societal changes felt in 2016 “may hinge on the election of Donald Trump, but it’s about the transformation of the entire political field and how politics has become culture,” Kidd said.
The most telling thing about time traveling to 2016 online, Maddox said, is the polarized response to the trend itself. The internet has gotten even messier, nastier, and angrier over the years, where something as innocuous as a photo from 2016 can inspire bad-faith comments.
“Nothing can happen on the Internet now without it becoming a mutual problem. Nothing can happen on the Internet now that can just ‘be,'” she said. “I think the amount of criticism I’ve seen about the trend is, to me, why this trend is happening in the first place.”