There is a word for the feeling you get looking at a photograph from the eighties and missing something you never lived through. The word is anemoia - nostalgia for a time you did not spend. And that word matters more to fashion today than any forecast for next season.

Ivan Denia, a fashion consultant and photographer working between Madrid and London, explains that designers are constantly researching backwards - old red carpets, historical periods, music, books, film. Fashion, as he puts it, works in the past and the future at once through constant revision. Nothing is created out of nothing; everything is reworked.

What has changed is not that fashion repeats itself - it always has. What has changed is the speed. The cycle used to run twenty to thirty years; now, according to Denia, it is incomparably shorter. The reason is social media. If the algorithm shows something enough times, it becomes a trend before anyone has decided it is one.

Maria Martin-Montalvo, director of institutional relations at ISEM Fashion Business School at the University of Navarra, says the same thing in different language: trends now coexist, and cycles shorten in response to the constant demand for novelty. There is no longer one dominant season - there are five running in parallel, and all of them are old.

Denia says of himself that he was born in 1982 and feels the strongest anemoia towards the eighties, specifically towards the Madrid cultural movement of that period. That is an honest detail: the man explaining the phenomenon admits he is part of it. And that is exactly the point - an unlived era always looks more interesting, because all we remember of it is the photographs, not the bills.

The pandemic, in his view, may have amplified that idealisation. People shut in, looking at their own lost years, produced what he calls an explosion of emotion and a stronger desire to live the moments they had missed. The industry has already named it: the revival spiral.

For a reader in the Balkans there is one more layer. Here nostalgia is not a fashion category, here it is a political currency traded regularly. The difference is that fashion at least admits it is selling a feeling for a time that never existed. Do the other nostalgia sellers admit the same?