Shrikant Singh 
Indian politics: How an AI makeover travelled from politicians to celebrities, flooded our feeds, and turned nostalgia into an unexpectedly useful form of public image-making.
Indian politics: For a few rather strange days this September, Indian politics seemed to have misplaced the present. Piyush Goyal appeared in a grey suit and aviators, looking less like a Union minister and more like someone whose photograph had been discovered at the back of an old family album. Kiren Rijiju posed beside a vintage car. Ramesh Chennithala and V. Sivankutty suddenly looked as though they belonged to a forgotten 1980s film. Before long, party accounts were imagining Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi in the same retro universe.
Then everybody else arrived. Actors, cricketers, television personalities, journalists, influencers, fan pages and thousands of ordinary users began appearing with bouffant hair, oversized glasses, high-waisted trousers, loud shirts, vivid saris and the unmistakable softness of old studio photography. Photographs taken on contemporary smartphones suddenly looked as if they had spent forty years fading inside somebody’s cupboard. The curious part was that none of these memories had actually happened, yet they somehow felt remembered.
Within a remarkably short time, what had begun as an AI makeover became one of those internet moments that seemed to be everywhere at once. And once politicians became some of its most visible participants, another question inevitably entered the conversation: was this really just harmless fun? Politicians, after all, rarely do anything publicly without understanding the value of visibility. So why were so many of them suddenly interested in looking as though they had stepped out of 1986? Perhaps the most interesting thing about these pictures was not that they made people look old. It was that they made power look harmless.
Indian politics: So who actually started it?
This is where the story becomes less conspiratorial, but perhaps more interesting. There is no convincing public evidence that an Indian political party or strategist invented the 1980s AI craze. On 8 September 2026, Piyush Goyal posted his own retro portrait on X and wrote, “Vibing to the 80s trend.” The wording is important. He was calling it a trend. In other words, he appeared to be joining something already happening rather than launching it.
Around the same time, Malayalam media were reporting similar portraits shared by Ramesh Chennithala and V. Sivankutty. Kiren Rijiju joined in on 9 September, joking about being pulled into the nostalgia. Soon, news websites were doing what news websites inevitably do when several famous people participate in the same visual joke: assembling galleries of political leaders in their imagined 1980s avatars. Suddenly, a collection of individual posts began looking like a national phenomenon.
The format was not uniquely Indian either. On 8 September, Brazilian media were already reporting an Instagram “Add Yours” chain in which people used AI to imagine themselves in the 1980s. Brazilian television star Xuxa responded with a rather perfect joke: she posted actual photographs of herself from the decade. She did not need artificial intelligence to visit the eighties; she had been there. Shashi Tharoor later played with essentially the same idea in India by sharing genuine archival photographs. That small act introduced another layer to the trend. Once everybody could manufacture a past, possessing a real one suddenly became its own form of cultural currency.
So the evidence does not point towards a politician secretly pressing the button that started the craze. What politicians did do was something arguably more important: they amplified it. There is a difference. Origin is about the first spark; amplification is about taking a spark that already exists and making millions of people notice the fire. A popular minister brings something an ordinary Instagram user cannot: a recognised face, institutional visibility and automatic newsworthiness. Once several political figures participate, the trend crosses an invisible boundary. It stops belonging only to social media and becomes a story about social media.
Indian politics: The 1980s We Are Remembering Never Quite Existed
Look closely at these pictures and another oddity appears. The AI version of the 1980s is not particularly interested in historical accuracy; it is interested in shorthand. Big hair, moustaches, aviators, broad collars, warm lighting, saturated fabrics, film grain and slightly faded colours are enough to establish the decade. In the Indian version, add a little Bollywood glamour, a little wedding-studio photography, perhaps a vintage car and enough softness to make the photograph look as though somebody’s mother carefully preserved it in an album. That becomes “the eighties.”
An entire decade, with all its politics, economic anxieties, technological changes, violence, cinema, fashion and contradictions, is reduced to a handful of immediately recognisable visual cues. But that reduction is also precisely why the trend works. Social media does not give an image very long to explain itself; it has to communicate before the thumb moves upward. The 1980s are extremely good at that. You do not need to know fashion history to recognise the visual language. More importantly, you do not need to own a vintage jacket, style your hair differently or book a photographer. You simply hand your face to a generative AI system and ask it to move you through time.
That marks an interesting change in the way fashion nostalgia works. Earlier revivals demanded some form of physical participation. You found the clothes, wore them, styled yourself and photographed the result. Now you can participate without changing anything about yourself at all. Generative AI has turned fashion into simulation. The broader return of 1980s aesthetics did not begin this week, of course. Fashion has been revisiting structured shoulders, power dressing and exaggerated silhouettes for years. But AI has added something fashion alone could not: we are no longer simply looking at the return of an era; we can now put ourselves inside it.
Indian politics: Missing a Decade, You May Never Have Lived Through
There is another reason these pictures are so difficult to scroll past: they are comforting. Nostalgia is often spoken about as if it were simply sadness for the past, but psychological research paints a more complicated picture. Work by Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides and their colleagues suggests that nostalgia can strengthen feelings of social connectedness, continuity, self-regard and meaning. We often turn backwards not because the past was necessarily better, but because remembering it can make the present feel a little more coherent.
The AI portrait offers a miniature version of that experience. A normal selfie tells us what somebody looks like today; the retro portrait seems to suggest that this version of the person has existed for years. Of course, it has not. But film grain is persuasive, and so are faded colours. They give an image the appearance of having survived something. The photograph looks as though it has travelled through time even though it may have been generated thirty seconds ago.
For people who actually remember the decade, the images may touch genuine autobiographical memories: family weddings, studio portraits, cinema halls, hairstyles, college photographs, early jobs or photographs of parents when they were younger. But the response of younger users is perhaps even more fascinating. You do not necessarily need to have lived through an era to feel attached to it. Researchers have described forms of vicarious or historical nostalgia in which people develop emotional relationships with periods they know only through photographs, films, music, stories and inherited memories.
A twenty-year-old can therefore feel nostalgic about the 1980s without having experienced a single day of them. They are not remembering the decade so much as remembering its mythology. AI makes the distinction between those two experiences surprisingly difficult to see.
Politicians Do Not Have Ordinary Instagram Accounts
Indian politics: This brings us back to politics. It would be slightly naive to imagine that prominent politicians use public social-media accounts in exactly the same way the rest of us do. A minister’s feed is not simply a digital scrapbook. Political accounts are communication infrastructure. Teams watch news cycles, prepare visuals, follow platform trends and think carefully about timing. This does not mean every funny photograph is born in a sophisticated strategy meeting. Sometimes a trend is simply a trend. But a playful post can still perform serious communication work.
Start with the simplest benefit: humanisation. Political imagery usually surrounds leaders with the visual architecture of power: podiums, flags, microphones, security personnel, motorcades, conference tables and official backdrops. The retro portrait quietly removes almost all of that. The office disappears, but the famous face remains. Suddenly the minister is a young man in aviators, a film hero, somebody’s stylish uncle or the subject of a meme. Power has not actually gone anywhere. It has merely changed clothes.
Political communication research has long examined the growing personalisation of politics, where leaders increasingly communicate through personality, appearance, emotion, family, lifestyle and individual identity rather than only through parties, programmes and ideology. Social media is particularly suited to this. Gunn Enli and Eli Skogerbø’s work on personalised political communication shows how platforms can produce a sense of individual, direct political presence even when campaign organisations remain very much behind the scenes.
The 1980s trend offered an unusually convenient version of this performance. A policy post asks audiences to evaluate something and therefore invites disagreement. A nostalgic photograph asks primarily for a reaction. It can generate attention without making a controversial claim, allow humour without requiring an elaborate joke, and make an account appear culturally alert. It also tells younger audiences that the politician understands what is happening on their feeds. More importantly, the photograph can travel into spaces where an ordinary ministry announcement rarely would: entertainment pages, lifestyle websites, meme accounts and television discussions.
India has already seen how carefully a leader’s visual identity can be constructed online. Joyojeet Pal’s research on Narendra Modi’s political tweeting, along with later research associated with Ponnurangam Kumaraguru’s group, documented the importance of digital communication in building and circulating political persona. The AI portraits are obviously much lighter material, but they inhabit the same attention economy. Sometimes the image accompanies the political message. Sometimes the image2 is the message. Here, the message was beautifully uncomplicated: I am here, I know the trend, and I am part of the moment.
The Safest Political Post Imaginable
Indian politics: Imagine managing a political account and wanting attention without controversy, engagement without debate, and a post capable of making people who normally ignore politics stop scrolling for a moment. A synthetic photograph of the leader looking unexpectedly good in 1980s clothes is almost absurdly efficient. It is surprising but not threatening, personal but not especially revealing, funny without becoming ridiculous and nostalgic without requiring a political position.
If people like the picture, the account gains positive engagement. If they mock it, the result may still be useful because the image continues circulating. V. Sivankutty’s portrait, for example, invited comparisons with Sukumara Kurup, the fugitive who occupies a peculiar place in Kerala’s popular imagination. But the joke did not stop the image from spreading; the joke became part of the spread.
This also helps explain why seeing politicians from different political camps participate should not automatically be treated as evidence of coordination. They do not need to share a strategy room; they merely need to share the same attention economy. Once one political figure appears culturally fluent, everyone else has a small incentive not to appear culturally absent. Nobody wants their account to resemble the one person at the party who has not understood what everybody is laughing about.
Why Your Feed Suddenly Looked as Though Everyone Was Doing It
Indian politics: There is something deceptive about virality. We tend to imagine it as a straight line in which someone creates something, millions discover it and it becomes viral. The reality is considerably messier. A trend moves in loops. Ordinary users establish that the format is repeatable, influencers accelerate it, famous people make it newsworthy, news organisations collect individual examples and give the phenomenon a name, algorithms notice repeated visual and textual patterns, and more users encounter and reproduce it. Eventually, you open your phone and wonder when everybody started doing the same thing.
Probably not everybody did. But your feed does not need everybody; it needs repetition. Research on online bandwagon effects has shown that people respond not only to visible measures of popularity but also to who appears to endorse or participate in something. A minister joining a trend is therefore not simply one more participant. Neither is a movie star or a major cricketer. Their participation changes our perception of the trend itself.
There is also something unusually reproducible about the retro portrait. You see one and immediately understand how to make your own. Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman’s widely cited research on online virality found that emotionally activating content tends to travel more readily. The retro portrait arrives with several emotional ingredients already built in: surprise, amusement, admiration, curiosity and warmth. But it carries something else as well: an instruction. Every successful image quietly tells the viewer that they can do the same thing with their own face.
Then journalism enters the loop. A gallery of politicians in 1980s clothes is easy to assemble, highly visual and instantly clickable. An explainer can show the pictures, reproduce the prompt and tell readers how to make their own versions. Soon headlines begin saying that the trend has “taken over social media.” At that point journalism is no longer simply describing the feeling that the trend is everywhere. It is helping create that feeling.
The Slight Unease Behind the Fun
Indian politics: None of this means there is anything sinister about giving yourself a flamboyant 1980s hairstyle. Most people are participating because it is fun. But the involvement of political figures introduces a question worth keeping in the corner of the frame. These photographs are synthetic. They depict real people in clothing, environments and moments that never existed. We recognise the alteration as playful, so we do not approach it with the suspicion we might bring to a fake political speech or fabricated video. That harmlessness is precisely what makes the moment interesting. Synthetic political imagery becomes ordinary not through fear, but through fun.
The Election Commission of India has already raised concerns about the responsible and ethical use of synthetic material in political communication, particularly where deep fakes and misinformation are involved. An obviously stylised retro portrait is not equivalent to a fabricated speech, fake event or misleading video, and that distinction matters. Still, both exist within the same rapidly expanding visual culture: one in which a recognisable public figure can be convincingly placed inside a moment that never happened. The more comfortable audiences become with that fact, the more important transparency becomes.
There is another inequality hidden inside the apparently democratic phrase “joining the trend.” You and a cabinet minister can technically perform the same action: upload a photograph, enter a prompt, generate an image and post it. But the two posts do not carry the same weight. An ordinary user transforms a selfie; a politician transforms a public brand. That brand may already have millions of followers, communication teams, media coverage and institutional visibility behind it. A single playful post can therefore generate newspaper stories and television discussions. The technology may be democratically available. Attention is not.
So, What Actually Came Back?
Indian politics: Not really the 1980s. What returned was our idea of the 1980s: a flattering, cinematic and highly edited version of the decade filled with warm colours, big hair, heroic poses and old-film texture, but none of the inconvenience of actually living there. AI made that fantasy effortless to enter. Politicians made it newsworthy. Celebrities made it glamorous. News coverage made it visible. Repetition made it feel inevitable.
If there was a political strategy at work, the available evidence does not justify the dramatic conclusion that somebody secretly engineered the entire craze. The strategy was probably much simpler: be where attention already is. Modern political communication is partly a competition for cultural presence. A leader does not always have to persuade you. Sometimes it is enough to remain visible in the spaces where you are already looking.
That is what makes the retro portrait such an interesting little object. It makes a public figure appear current by making them look old. It softens authority without surrendering it. It creates engagement without asking the audience to agree with anything. And it allows political communication to slip briefly into entertainment, where our instinct to scrutinise it is considerably weaker.
Indian politics: For a few days, India appeared to rediscover the 1980s. But what we were really watching was something thoroughly contemporary: the extraordinary speed with which AI, celebrity, politics, journalism and algorithms can combine to manufacture a cultural moment. Politicians did not demonstrably create the current. They simply recognised it early enough, stepped into it with faces the country already knew, and helped turn what looked like a ripple into a flood.
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