Over at Fimoculous, Internet meme-collector Rex Storgatz reflects on the differences between postmodern nostalgia and contemporary nostalgia. See the comments, where he makes it particularly clear:
the ’90s discovered a new form of nostalgia, one in which that past is evoked not for its fond remembrance, but for its empty representation.
Take for example, the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who died yesterday. For McQueen, the past wasn’t an object of nostalgia as much as an endless source of patterns.
But what about Mad Men, which seems to have a certain degree of nostalgia to it? Does this contradict Storgatz’s thesis? Perhaps one way to look at Mad Men is to realize that it operates in the aftermath of Midcentury Modernism. Now Midcentury Modernism is a product of the late 1990s, not the 1950s, and brings us the idea that the promise of the objects of the 1950s could only fully be realized in our own moment.
