This looks like it could just be cherry picking. If you look hard enough, you can find someone rebellious, then 20 years later, someone trying to maintain those ideals, and so forth. There's so many people, so many stories out there, you could form any narrative you wanted about theories of generational cycles.
I'll bet it says more about the overlap between fashion and the media than it says about people.
Something comes back 'into style' at intervals and the narrative is hyped up to accentuate that fact. But it probably has more to do with burnout and collective amnesia. We've forgotten how awful "bell bottoms" can be and so here's some "bell bottoms", 20-30 years later.
