Nostalgia is old news when it comes to culture: We are forever recycling the past. What does change from era to era is our attitude toward looking back, and when times get tough, the reminiscing tends to get rosier. In the turbulent ’70s, the ’50s were preserved in kitsch amber through shows like “Happy Days.” In the last decade, in the midst of a global financial meltdown, we retreated into the ’60s of “Mad Men,” craving the stylish haze of Camel smoke and cocktails. Last year, amid the most contentious election of our lifetime, the grainy stock footage and ’80s soundtrack of “Stranger Things” provided a near-safety blanket.

Reverential nostalgia has been bubbling to the surface for the past year or so, to the point where the recollection is so unapologetically affectionate that it borders on replication. It seems we’re now in the business not of pastiche but of faithful re-creation — less drag show, if you will, than tribute band. The scattered bits of macramé in high-end shelter magazines and top restaurants, the Misfits and Leonard Cohen covers on Spotify, the shoulder pads and bodysuits on the fall runways — that, maybe, is par for the postmodern course. But in low moments one begins to wonder if the popularity of adult coloring books speaks to a larger creative crisis — or at least, a crisis of progression.

The chief designer of Vetements, Demna Gvasalia (also creative director of Balenciaga), has made no bones about the direct influence of the designer Martin Margiela. With their recent shows, Vetements — current darlings of the avant-garde — essentially recreated Margiela’s designs of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Last year, the Berlin-based gallery Sprüth Magers opened a space in Los Angeles. One of its first shows was a sometimes-literal nod to the dealer Monika Sprüth’s short-lived ’80s magazine Eau de Cologne, which featured the work of five female artists: Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel. The new gallery largely restaged what was in the magazine. Farther up the coast, in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art’s In Situ restaurant has started offering what they call “a bracing new concept in fine dining”: a menu of existing dishes from 80 different international chefs — a culinary greatest hits.