An Ode to Repurposed Art

The year is 1961. Paul Newman is in love. So is Sydney Poitier. The city of Paris is a painting in hazy grayscale; a brooding romantic playground. For over 90 minutes, the two men find themselves wandering past sidewalk cafes and the Seine alongside two American girls, trying to sort out romantic feelings in between playing sets at a smoky jazz club. The film, appropriately titled Paris Blues, provides escapism at its finest. Almost immediately after watching it for the first time I realized that I enjoyed it so much because it bore similarities to another one of my favorite movies that also put jazz and complicated romance at the forefront of the plot. I’m talking, of course, about La La Land. Both films offer audiences their fair share of romanticism, while the latter serves as a love letter to Newman and Poitier’s modern world.

When La La Land was released in 2016, it immediately received acclaim from both critics and audiences. It was praised for its ability to mix contemporary cinema with nostalgia and is currently tied with Titanic and All About Eve for the most Oscar nominations in history with 14. Since then, La La Land has kickstarted a desire to see a specific corner of memory represented in present-day artistry. Conversation after conversation has been had about how the influences of the 90s and 2000s have made their mark in our culture today, but the decades before, specifically the 1940s, 50s, and '60s, are having a quiet renaissance. The echoes have always been there, but Gen Z, in particular, is newly smitten with making it a phenomenon.

Nostalgia itself is all at once sweet and overwhelming. It’s a stomach ache, but it’s also being enveloped in a soft, familiar blanket. It doesn’t come in slow increments, it completely engulfs you. Depending on how it's approached, it's either something we relish or prefer not to dwell on. There is rarely an in-between to these feelings. Chinese-Icelandic singer Laufey prefers that we look at it positively and lay in the romance of it all.

As a trained piano and cello player with a penchant for evoking sounds of days gone by, Laufey seems to encourage her young listeners to step away from the overstimulation and noise of modern media and sit with jazz. Though it is evident that she and her work are great admirers of artists like Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, she remains aware that it is still 2025 and not 1955. “At the end of the day, I’m making music for Gen Z,” she told Vogue. “I speak and act very much in that way.”

Attending a Laufey concert is altogether magical and surprising. Her fanbase is made up of mostly 15-25-year-olds, a fact that somewhat astonished me when I attended her show last year. I grew up listening to jazz but had always assumed I was largely alone in that category because of my age. It seems I’m wrong. Her shows themselves are cinematic. It was the first and only time that I’ve observed an audience sit through an entire show without standing up once. Her stage layout is free of any screens or complicated technology, aside from a backdrop of twinkling star-like lights that lend to the dreamy ambiance of her musical world. Her band was bathed in warm light courtesy of the large floor lamps, reminiscent of the ones used on old Hollywood film sets.

It’s quite a lovely feeling to sit amongst peers, disconnected in a big sense, and absorb music in a much more classical way. There is a sense of wanting to re-center oneself in her music and looking to return to something more meaningful. We wish to kiss and respect the innovators before us but understand that perhaps the best way to pay homage to them is to invent rather than replicate, as they did in their own time.

This retreat and search for sincerity is arguably a form of self-care. There’s something very grounding about art of the past and the weightless feeling it carries with it. The narrative and thoughtfulness it brings to the table. Keeping in mind that it bears its imperfections and problematic elements that we’ve wisely learned not to replicate, it doesn’t seem to have the ego that can easily come with what we consume today. It’s refreshing to see creators take a page from this book and happily let go of that conceit. There’s confidence to exist and innovate in your own realm while also including a little bit of the soul and energy of creators of the past.

It’s noticeable in physical spaces, too. The ones we interact with frequently affect our senses, whether or not we’re aware of it. Dallas restaurant Little Daisy is a perfect example. The barely year-old restaurant, designed by local interior designer Caroline Todd, is an intimate space, softly lit by brass lamps and decorated in vintage posters from 1905 to 1950. The centerpiece, though, is a custom, hand-drawn wallpaper that stretches the entire ceiling. It has a spirit, even a ghostly quality to it, that transcends decades and lingers with us in hospitality.

One can understand that a place like this is meant to serve as a backdrop for shared human experiences. These walls were meant to witness engagements and birthdays and ends of relationships and losses of loved ones. It’s a tall order to hold all that in one space, but it comes down to looking past what’s practical. We can no longer rely on just functionality to sustain us. It’s about history. Going past our desires and lifetimes to consider what we are leaving future generations to draw inspiration from.