The analogue era is sweetly referred to perpetually by millennials, Gen Z, and generations that remember the time before https:// was the precursor to just about every aspect of life. Why? Because we want to go on a nostalgic reverie for the era before the world changed irrevocably. A time when bills had to be paid with something called ‘cash’ at a building called a ‘bank’ that was made of real bricks and mortar and not javascript. The period in history when you had to buy a newspaper or magazine or turn on the radio to find out what was going on anywhere that wasn’t directly in front of you. If a new ready-to-wear collection was being showcased in Paris, then only a select few sat on gold gilt chairs in the salons would know about it; then, they might graciously publish written words on something called ‘paper’ that made up the pages of a ‘printed magazine’. You had to physically go to a store to buy this publication to be able to find out more about the trends, clothes, and happenings at a fashion show.

Before YouTube shorts, TikTok reels, Snap, and IG stories, people owned something called a ‘television set’ that had an ‘aerial’ you had to plug in. Electricity power cuts happened a lot and if there was a thunderstorm, your ‘aerial’ might not work. Did you want to call a friend? Ah, then, you’d need to use your landline and spend a fortune per minute to communicate, and before the time of the cordless phone, you would have to stand or sit next to where the phone was plugged in. Walkmans and Discmans were cool but annoying because you had to wait 30 seconds to rewind a ‘single’ to relisten; if you pressed the buttons too hard then the tape might overspin and split. And woe betide you if you moved suddenly while holding a Discman - the song would skip. Phone boxes were actually in use and people carried money in the form of ‘coins’ in order to pay for things in shops that had strict opening hours and existed in malls or buildings. Amazon and Net-a-Porter were not even possible conceptions at this point in time.

This information may come as a shock to anyone born after 1990. The internet came into being in 1983 but it wasn’t until early the 1990s before some households would be able to try and access web pages via a modem that would take about 20 mins to dial-up (very loudly) to the www. If you managed to get online without having to forget dinner because it took so. very. long. to. load. you would probably lose connection after two minutes anyway. But at least you could see the early kernels of the digital revolution before the Millennium Bug destroyed civilization (note: this didn’t actually happen but everyone feared it would for all of 1999).