The Case for Nostalgia
Bettina Dargie · 2026-09-10
New York Fashion Week is underway. Among the American names on the schedule, Ralph Lauren and Coach stand out as two of the few growing while the wider luxury market slows. Coach grew 24% across Tapestry’s fiscal 2026, and Ralph Lauren crossed $8 billion in revenue for the first time in its history, up 14.6%, on cable-knit sweaters and polo shirts. The write-ups have landed on one word for why. Nostalgia.
It’s a tidy explanation and it accounts for very little. Brands go back to their own archives constantly and most of what comes out of them disappears again within two years. So the more useful question is whether the ones that work have anything in common, and whether it’s specific enough to be worth calling a formula.
Fashion has run the experiment in both directions.
Adidas spent 2024 selling shoes it designed decades ago. Currency-neutral revenues rose 12% for the year and footwear rose 17%, with the company crediting Originals and naming the Samba, Gazelle, Handball Spezial and Campus.
Nike spent the same stretch doing a version of the same thing and lost ground. Its retro basketball franchises — the Air Force 1, the Air Jordan 1 and the Dunk — had carried the brand for years, and by the time Elliott Hill returned as CEO they were oversupplied. Revenue fell 9% to $11.3 billion in the third quarter, and the correction is to shrink those three styles by ten percentage points of the footwear mix. Hill has been careful to call them beloved silhouettes rather than mistakes, which they aren’t. They were simply everywhere.
Same instinct, opposite results, in the same category and the same two years.
Outside fashion the split is just as clean.
Urban Decay retired the original Naked palette in 2018 after more than 30 million units and over a billion dollars in sales; the 2024 reissue sold 60% of its stock in the first 48 hours and sold out online inside a month. Starbucks put the Unicorn Frappuccino back on the menu for two days last month and moved more than two million of them, for the best North American sales weekend in the company’s history. Cadbury returned the Wispa as a limited trial in October 2007, sold 20 million bars in seven weeks and made it permanent the following year. Tim Hortons restored the physical roll for Roll Up The Rim’s fortieth anniversary and committed to keeping it, under the headline “We heard you, Canada”.
Against that: Pepsi Blue sold 17 million cases in its first year and about 5 million in its second, was discontinued in 2004, came back in 2021 to genuine affection and went away again. Doritos brought 3D back in 2021 renamed, with two new flavours, baked instead of fried, and it hasn’t been on US shelves since around 2023.
The pattern that sorts them.
The winning column has one thing running underneath it. Every product in it was removed by a decision rather than by customers. The Naked palette was doing 30 million units and a billion dollars when Urban Decay retired it. The Wispa was cut in a portfolio tidy-up. Roll Up The Rim went digital for operational reasons and Tim Hortons heard about it for years afterwards. Pepsi Blue had already fallen to under a third of its opening year before anyone pulled it, which means its 2021 return re-ran an experiment that already had a result.
The second divider is fidelity. Urban Decay changed a mirror and softened a formula, and the palette was still recognisably the palette. Doritos changed the name, both flavours and the cooking method, and produced a new snack wearing an old snack’s goodwill.
The third is the one Adidas and Nike separate on, and it’s the least intuitive. Cadbury ran a trial before committing to a production line. Starbucks ran two days. Nike ran the Dunk and the Air Force 1 at full volume for years until the thing that made them worth wanting was gone. Scarcity is doing work here that the product can’t do on its own — and Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza showed the other edge of it, running seven times its previous demand and emptying restaurants in a fortnight.
So the formula, as far as the evidence supports one:
The product has to have been killed by a decision, not by indifference.
It has to come back as the thing people remember, closely enough that someone who loved it would know it blind.
It has to stay scarce, with an end date or a cap, and with enough supply behind it to survive being right.
None of that requires heritage. The three conditions are as available to a brand founded in 2023 as to one founded in 1967, because none of them are about age. They’re about what happened to the product and what gets done with it on the way back.
The hard part sits upstream of all three, and Tim Hortons put four words on it: we heard you, Canada. An archive is a list of things a company stopped doing. It doesn’t say which of them anyone still wants. That information lives with customers, who as a rule have already volunteered it.