Yuha Lotus Cho is a Graphic and Visual Designer, currently designing at Mother Design. She is based in New York, United States and Seoul, South Korea. She was previously at No Ideas. She holds an BFA from the School of Visual Arts. She specializes in brand identity, brand strategy, editorial design, web design, and art direction.

VIWe Need to make Space for Childhood Nostalgia

As we move through life with urgency, it feels almost inevitable that we orient ourselves toward the future. Progress, growth, ambition become second nature. Yet the further we move into adulthood, the easier it becomes to forget our instincts, the quieter impulses that once guided how we felt, imagined, and played.

Is there a way to gently recall the memories of childhood that still reside within us, not as sentimentality, but as something more fundamental? Fashion brand SUPER YAYA and Bode presented their new season on a doll instead of a model. Where does this styling instinct come from? Didn’t many of us first learn how to dress, how to imagine, by clothing dolls as children?

Nostalgic is not simply about history, rather deeper emotional memory: how it felt to trust intuition, to respond before reasoning, to find meaning in our childhood memory. Bibibi, designed by Ingo Maurer, was originally created as a wedding gift for his friend, which introduces mystery through instinctive, almost childlike imagination.

Could revisiting these fragments awaken a different kind of nostalgia—one that speaks not to who we were, but to what still remains within us? A nostalgia not rooted in the past itself, but in the instincts we gradually learned to suppress as we became adults.