This is commodity nostalgia — the sort that manifests in buying, collecting and studying consumer goods from the past. It’s expressed in an aesthetic of “quaintness” — finding anachronistic texts, ideas and objects desirable precisely because they are now considered outmoded.

Commodity nostalgia uses consumer goods as sensory bridges between a present defined as crass or uninspiring and a magical, glamorous past. Through the distinctive looks, scents, tastes and textures of longstanding brands — Brylcreem, Pears, Barney Banana, Fred Perry, Chanel No. 5, Glomesh — consumers can revisit their remembered pasts and imagine how it might have felt to live in whatever period these brands were at their peak.