Something strange is going on with TikTok, and it’s tough to put your finger on it. If you scroll for a long time on any given afternoon, you will start to notice it: the lines around the jaw, the way they look, and the kind of confidence that doesn’t need your approval. All of a sudden, faces from a different time are everywhere. Not through campaigns that bring back memories or look back at fashion week. Just because an algorithm found something it wasn’t supposed to.
Like most things on TikTok, the trend began in a quiet way. People started posting old videos and scanned magazine spreads from the early 1990s. There was Vendela on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Guinevere van Seenus in an old campaign, and Anneliese Seubert in a picture that was put together so well that it doesn’t even look like an ad. The comment sections quickly got full. Gen Z, who grew up with filtered selfies and the same beauty tutorials, didn’t laugh at these women. They were shocked by them.
It’s possible that they weren’t responding to beauty in the usual sense. There was more to it than that. Instead of being made by an algorithm and edited to be perfect in every way, these models looked like real people who had been photographed. The faces were all different. There were depths. The idea seemed pretty radical.
Vendela Kirsebom is probably the best example of what came after. She went back to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit runway during Miami Swim Week in 2023 and did the famous pose she did on the cover of the magazine in 1993. The reception was huge. People didn’t look at her as interesting or like a throwback. People talked to her like she was important because TikTok had already made her important again. People in the room knew her face before she left.
It’s not just the comeback that’s interesting; it’s also how it happened. It wasn’t planned by a publicist. No plan was made to bring the brand back to life. Someone who really liked what they were watching posted a bunch of short videos that brought in people who hadn’t been there before. Some of those models, like Anneliese Seubert, have been working quietly for years, doing odd jobs for brands like Australia’s Country Road without much attention. TikTok found them and turned up the volume on careers that had stopped being as loud before.
Right now, this feels like a part of something bigger than nostalgia. The posts that are going viral are ones that talk about the difference between beauty in 1996 and today. In 1996, beauty was like a magazine spread that you looked at for a short time. Today, beauty is like something that an algorithm shows you all day. It can be really clear for women on TikTok to describe what it’s like to scroll through 10,000 identical faces before breakfast. In this situation, a supermodel from 1993 who looks like a real person starts to feel better.
People in the fashion world have seen. The style that was popular in those magazine spreads—with its fitted blazers, pencil skirts, glasses, and shapely clothes—has started to be used as a model again by both designers and fast-fashion brands. The line between historical reference and current trend is not as clear as it used to be.
There is still a lot of uncertainty about whether any of this will lead to long-term innovation in the models themselves or whether it is just a warm wave that will pass. For now, though, there is something quietly satisfying about seeing an era that fashion said was over come back through the door—not because of a corporate campaign, but because some teenager hit “repost.”
