The other simple math powering this strange rehabilitation is the ages of everyone involved. In 2025, the median millennial turned 36 or 37, the point by which someone has, or should have, renounced all pretense of being a young person, especially if they’ve become a parent. You can still be stylish, hot and well-informed, but you can’t pretend you’re on the bleeding edge. Millennials who spent their late 20s and early 30s clinging to their youth had to disavow the culture of their teens and sign up to what the zoomers were into; now, at last, they can admit they did like trilbies and indie-folk all along. Paradoxically, this makes them less cringe, not more. Now millennials are too old to care about being cool, they’re cool again.

It appears something of a generational ceasefire has broken out. Consider this tweet, which circulated last December like an omen for the coming year. “I would have been a great millennial,” wrote the early-20s journalist Cami Fateh. “I would work at i-D and my friends would work at Vice and Buzzfeed News and we’d write listicles and Twitter was at its prime. Unfortunately, I was too busy being in the sixth grade to participate.” It’s a dig at millennials for being old—but a gentle, almost affectionate one. The world in which they were on top is viewed nostalgically, and as something completely historical. Some zoomers are even making TikTok odes to 2010s “millennial optimism”, with pictures drenched in the sepia tint of early Instagram filters.

Millennials, in other words, are no longer a threat. And that means Gen Z can admit that, yes, some millennial culture is cool. Bands with noisy guitars can be cool. Jeans that cut off blood circulation to your calves can be cool. This acknowledgement is validating for millennials themselves, but it’s also good for Zoomers. The oldest of them are now in their late 20s; in a few years, they’ll be heading for 35. Soon, to paraphrase LCD Soundsystem, they’ll be losing their edge to the Gen Alpha kids coming up from behind. But they’ll know that, sometime around 2040, their baggy trousers and hyperpop and Labubus will creep back into fashion. It’s not the getting old that’s hard—it’s the period before you admit it.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.