Return of Bridget Jones taps into 90s trend as gen Z looks to ‘simpler’ time
Almost three decades after Bridget Jones first appeared in a whirl of chardonnay, big knickers and body insecurity, she’s back for her fourth appearance on screen. In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, out in cinemas this month, the eponymous character is no longer a klutzy thirtysomething singleton obsessed with finding a husband, but a klutzy middle-aged widow – sadder, perhaps, but no less of a comic disaster, and still hoping for a boyfriend, or at least a shag.
If the movie, as seems likely, follows its three predecessors to huge box office success, that will not just be thanks to an audience of now middle-aged women. Bridget’s creator, Helen Fielding, said recently that at her book signings “half the audience are gen Zs”. “I’m really happy when 18-year-olds and 20-year-olds talk to me about it and say that they find it comforting to laugh at these things.”
Related: Big knickers, bad decisions and old bats: Renée Zellweger on the return of Bridget Jones
Bridget Jones is far from the only 90s icon finding new and younger audiences. Last summer’s rush for tickets for the forthcoming Oasis tour was fuelled both by those with memories of Knebworth in 1996, and their children desperate to recreate it.
Low-slung jeans, crop tops, fake fur coats and visible lipliner are everywhere. Sales of retro 90s perfumes such as CK One, Tommy Girl and Joop! are booming. Disposable cameras are cool again. Even Demi Moore and Cameron Diaz are back. What’s going on?
Miranda Sawyer spent the 90s working as a music journalist and recently published a book about Britpop; she, too, was surprised at her signings to see so many gen Z readers among the crowds of misty-eyed forty- and fiftysomethings.
In one way, it’s not surprising. “Oasis is their folk music,” she says of a generation that has grown up hearing Britpop on the radio. “They’re the songs that everybody knows, that people will sing when they’re drunk; they’re just part of the ether.”
But she also noticed a sense of envy among younger people about a time that seems more carefree, she says. “Everyone in the 90s was just going out and getting trolleyed all the time. There’s a kind of excitement to that, because it is harder for young people to do that now.
“To go out, have a really good time, get pretty smashed, go to a gig and then a club – that’s literally unaffordable for a lot of people. It’s not just that those places don’t exist any more – it’s that even if they did, they couldn’t afford to go to them.
“There’s a kind of freedom around [the 90s].”
Hannah Bradfield, a freelance journalist and blogger who at 25 still lives with her parents in Norwich, agrees. “I think we’re nostalgic for that time because, well, it looked simpler,” she says. To her, the 90s mean Kate Moss, the supermodels, scrunchies and lipliner, and distant tales of carefree raving. Her mum has told stories of Interrailing in her summers, “when all your parents received were the odd postcards and calls from a phone box letting them know you were alive” – unimaginable to a generation that is always attached to a device.
Bradfield says she and her friends are anxious about the future, “and I do think that the internet and social media are at the heart of everything, really. It’s great for some things, but it is just quite out of control now, really. And I think we’re maybe nostalgic for a time where we didn’t have that, even if we weren’t there. Everything just seemed a bit more fun.”
Nostalgia can be rose-tinted, however. Dr Julie Whiteman, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s business school, has researched gen Z’s attachment to the era, and argues that some 90s throwbacks are returning as part of a misogynistic backlash to the attitudes of a more progressive generation. (Loaded magazine, she notes, has also recently attempted a comeback.)
“The key thing about 90s popular culture is that its use of irony and banter masks the misogyny and other forms of discrimination that are very present in it,” she says.
“For many people, the 90s were not that enjoyable. But I think that’s very much the image that’s presented. The women are laughing along with the jokes, because you kind of had to.”
Sheryl Garratt, who edited the Face magazine in the 1990s and is now a coach for creatives, says: “I’m old enough now to realise every era gets recycled every few years, and each time we see it through slightly more rose-tinted glasses. We tend to recycle the best bits and forget all the awful bits.”
The decade, she points out, was also an era of restricted licensing hours, homophobia and “bending over at work and finding a hand on my bum”.
Yet, as the parent of a 28-year-old who doesn’t know if he’ll ever own a home, she says: “Everything joyful feels harder today.
“I think whenever times are tough, we look for escape, and times have never been tougher. Why wouldn’t you retreat into what looks like a really colourful, simple and easy past?”
