Open Instagram these days, and you can almost find yourself transported to the 1980s. Big hair, oversized sunglasses, colourful clothes, old-school bedrooms, film-grain filters and poses straight out of an old family album are suddenly everywhere. The platform is calling it the ‘80s trend’, and social media users are happily joining in.
TRENDING TIMES
The trend is fairly simple. Users upload a photograph to an AI image generator and ask it to recreate them as though the picture had been taken in the 1980s. The result can be anything from a retro Bollywood-style portrait to a family photograph complete with vintage clothes, hairstyles and backgrounds. Instagram’s ‘Add Yours’ feature has also helped it spread, with one person posting their version and others following suit.
It is the latest in a long line of AI-generated image trends that have taken over social media. In March 2025, the Studio Ghibli trend had users turning photographs, memes and even major news images into illustrations resembling the Japanese animation studio’s distinctive aesthetic. It was fun to look at, easy to create and almost impossible to escape online. But it also brought questions about copyright, artistic ownership and whether AI should be allowed to reproduce recognisable
artistic styles.
POLITICIANS TOO
The 80s trend is slightly different, with nostalgia doing much of the work this time. Something is appealing about seeing a present-day photograph dressed up as an old one. For younger users, it offers a glimpse of a decade they never experienced. For those who grew up in the 80s, it can recreate the photographs, fashion, and visual style of the time. And now, even politicians are getting involved. Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, among others, has joined the trend, sharing an AI-generated image of himself in an 80s-inspired look.
PRIVACY QUESTIONS
But like most AI trends, there are questions beyond the picture that appears on our screens.
The first is what happens to the photographs people upload. A photograph is still personal data, even when it’s used simply to create a fun picture for Instagram. As these trends encourage people to hand over their photographs to AI tools, questions about how those images are stored, processed or potentially used also come up. The novelty of seeing yourself as an 80s version can make it easy to forget what is happening to the original photograph in the process.
ENVIRONMENTAL COST
Then there is the environmental cost. An AI-generated image may appear on a screen within seconds, but creating it requires computing power in data centres. That means electricity, cooling, and in some cases, water.
The growing use of generative AI has already raised concerns about the amount of energy and water needed to run these systems. Generating images can also require more computing power than some simpler AI tasks, although the exact environmental impact depends on the system being used.
Of course, one person creating one retro photograph is not going to make or break the planet. But social media trends are rarely about one person; they involve thousands, sometimes millions, of people doing the same thing because everyone else is doing it.
That raises a rather odd question. How much environmental cost goes into creating images that may disappear from our feeds within a few days? That is perhaps the strange cycle of social media. A trend appears, everyone rushes to try it before it is over, and soon enough something else takes its place. First it was the Ghibli-style images in 2025. Then there were other AI transformations and figurine-style edits. Now, apparently, the internet wants to see what everyone would have looked like in the 1980s.
VINTAGE VIBES
For now, the 80s are back, at least on our screens. Whether it is nostalgia, curiosity or simply the fun of seeing what we might have looked like in another decade, the trend has clearly caught on. But behind that instant transformation is a trail that is not quite as pretty as the final image.
From the photographs being uploaded to the energy and resources used to create them, there is more to these trends than what appears on our Instagram feeds.
And with social media constantly looking for the next thing to make everyone stop scrolling, it will be interesting to see what other trends come up on social media.
