Are you getting stuck in the millennial nostalgia trap?

Or: Why bootleg Oasis tees are now selling for thousands

Brace yourselves, fellow millennials. Your ratty old band tee, long discarded, is now being sold for the price of an small car:

Some of them are bootleg! (Note to self: keep my official Britney Circus tour t-shirt from the O2). It’s just the latest sign, if it were needed, that Millennial culture is now firmly the subject of a retro revival.

Which can be nice. I for one have found Noel and Liam’s onstage reconciliation the sweetest story to come out of the music industry in ages (fair, there aren’t that many to choose from). They even held hands! Long may it last.

And it’s been fun to see the clips from the shows – Liam demonstrating that running on Hampstead Heath and soberish living has done him wonders.

BUT. Millennials. The flipside of the Oasis concert hype? The tees selling for thousands? A warning for us all. We must avoid the nostalgia trap.

I don’t mean going to concerts – I wish I’d managed to get tickets. I’m not calling - of course not - for the band to sing the new songs (sorry to Beady Eye). I do mean resenting when the next gen sweetly gets dressed up in their box-fresh Oasis gear (on sale on River Island, M&S, Next, to name just a few) to enjoy the show too. Or going on about how this is proper music, that this is how you do it.

Because we’re at the age now where there’s a host of my peers chorusing that it was better in our day, in all sorts of ways. When concertgoers had no phones. When people in clubs actually danced. When you had to go to an office, when you couldn’t scroll ad infinitum, when you had to date without the apps (maybe I’d agree with that last one). Moaning on about how once they could get down, but now they can barely get up. Which I am not sure is really serving us.

I do get it. It was, well, all a while ago first time round. My beloved Clueless is 30 years old! My college reunion, upcoming, had the audacity and insight to use this iconic and now on-trend montage to illustrate our decade’s upcoming get together:

Whatever happened to the dreaming spires

Every generation goes through this - sees the trends of their younger days recycled and reclaimed by a new cohort of youth. It’s not always a comfortable feeling.

But millennials – the generation famous for refusing to grow up, for abandoning many of the traditional markers of adulthood* – has perhaps struggled with aging more than most. (*Not that it was exactly our fault, as house prices soared out of reach etc etc.)

Growing up, I hated when my friends would tell me we were so old. At 21! Even then, I knew it was ridiculous - and would one day be regrettable. And yet it continued. The pal who decided we were past it for a club in our LATE TWENTIES. The hen where the bride’s friends were bemoaning how old they were for listening to Radio 4 in their EARLY THIRTIES. You cannot imagine the FORTY freakouts in the years of run-up.

“We’re so old,” they’d say then. “We’re so old!” And now, inevitably, we are older than ever before - except for the ones who weren’t lucky enough to make it this far.

It’s not much better when millennials go the other way in response to the anxiety of aging, insisting on how young they look, boasting about how they are frequently mistaken for sylphs in their twenties, a recent and embarrassing social media trend representing a narrative I’d like to be excluded from. Same fear, with a filter added.

For me, the whole thing is a bit like jet lag, very de rigueur to focus on. Admit it and you crumble. Better to down espresso and ignore the whole shebang. (Which is why, the next time someone tries to rope me into a we’re so old conversation, I am going to refuse to play the polite game. “Oh poor you,” I will say sorrowfully. “It’s sad that you feel that way.”)

Of course, I’m being a bit tongue in cheek. It’s understandable to worry about aging; that time may be running out to do what we want. And, ultimately, all this tension and weirdness points to a fear of something still more final – the end of it all. But what’s the alternative? There isn’t one.

So, we must do our best not to take out our anxiety about it on the ones coming after us - to avoid the It Was Better The First Time Round clichés. To not ringfence the things we loved then as still ours alone.To stop ourselves from saying, as our mothers once did, that fashion these days “is all the same” as when we were growing up. Even if some of it is. (Most of us weren’t going round in chic Nineties Calvin separates or Girl Next Door / Paris Hilton kitsch, anyway. I for one was proud of my black velvet Blossom hat and a chiming silver ball I wore on a long black string.)

Nostalgia can be a slippery trap. Hold on too tight to the past and you miss out on the present. Or, as some might say: don’t look back in anger.