Nostalgia Has Entered the Costco Aisle

Costco has brought back the Esprit sweatshirt, and Netflix brought back Little House on the Prairie. Someone has apparently found the Gen X nostalgia button, and midlifers are losing their collective minds.

Maybe someone should keep pressing that button.

I couldn’t afford name brands in high school, so buying an Esprit sweatshirt now feels more significant than a sweatshirt probably should. It’s the grown-up version of finally getting something I once coveted.

And I didn’t just watch Little House on the Prairie when I was young. I lived it. Well, sort of. In first grade, I spent every recess acting out Laura Ingalls lore. I grew my hair long for braids. My mom sewed me a bonnet and prairie dress, and we roded in a covered wagon as a family in the 1976 America’s Bicentennial parade with my grandpa’s horses. I was all in. So, yeah. I lived my version of it.

I had the freckles and all, but I never got called to be Melissa Gilbert’s stand-in. When I wandered through Target recently, I noticed the prairie dresses are back too. They aren’t the least bit flattering on my rounder, post-menopausal frame. Well, maybe as pajamas?

What will it be next? Swatch watches? Jelly shoes? I thought I’d be so smart and call the next thing: Lip Smackers. But they are already back. Dr Pepper, bubble gum, and flavors that were actually gross but super cool all at the same time—just because—in roller bottles of stickiness.

Perhaps Gen X is on Lip Smacker or sweatshirt away from healing something.

Have you noticed that nostalgia hits differently in midlife? It is not only about wanting the sweatshirt, the prairie dress, or the giant tube of flavored lip gloss. Want to know what I secretly think it is? Sometimes it’s about getting to revisit the younger version of ourselves who wanted those things. It’s healing to step back and think of who I was then and what I yearned for.

Also, how quickly four decades disappeared into thin air. Crazy!

The younger version of me who wanted those things forty-one years ago was also was going on her first date with the guy that would become my husband. He took me to an antique car show on that weekend. Aw. Sweet, isn’t it? I’d have wanted the shoes and the sweatshirt . . . and the lip gloss!

I’m not trying to go backward. Yikes! Most of us have no desire to relive high school, squeeze our puffy feet into jelly shoes in July humidity, or survive the awkwardness of the eighties version of life. But it feels good to recover a little of the delight we left behind and to think wistfully about what might have been.

I worked a job from the time I was fifteen. If I wanted the shoes or the sweatshirt, or lip gloss, I saved up my money. Younger me was also pretty frugal. And pretty broke. But what I realize about my fifty-seven-year-old self is that I am not all that different. I would want to purchase the reprises for the same reasons: because all the cool kids have them. And even though now I can buy the sweatshirt if I wanted to, I’m still pretty frugal. So I probably won’t.

And still, I want it. Just because.

Maybe the encores that bring a blast from the past simply remind us that those younger versions of us are still in here somewhere, waiting for the next comeback announcement. We’re collectively enjoying the conversations with other midlife women about our most amazing legacy and reveling in someone else’s fascination with it.

And we’re becoming the grandmas already. Rememer when we brought back our grandmothers’ poodle skirts for fifties dances? We are the retro generation now, and the kids are doing eighties dances.

We wore banana clips in high school, went to college with a mullet, and gave birth to babies a few years later with one tall, permed clump of bangs on our foreheads. (Yes, I styled that bang nonsense for postpartum photos.) But we were awesome.

We wore our pants folded tightly to our ankles and tucked into our slouchy white athletic socks in high school, turned our polo collars up in college, embracing pleated, puffy stonewashed jeans, and wore oversized blouses over stirrup pants when we were in the early career years.

We don’t need the latest thing unless it’s this generation bringing back what made us the OG cool forty years ago, thank you very much.

Now that I think about it, maybe I need that Esprit shirt after all.

P. S. Costco was sold out.