Today is my day for sharing old answers! Yes, in the early twentieth century there was a great deal of nostalgia for the 1890s.

Building off of and rearranging what I've previously written here and here ...

In the early twentieth century, the 1890s represented the most recent and therefore easily remembered part of the Victorian era. "Victorian" has come to mean a lot of things beyond "relating to the reign of Victoria, 1837-1901": broadly speaking, things that are recognizably not "modern". This started relatively soon after the end of the queen's reign, with those in the late 1910s and 1920s seeing themselves as part of a "post-Victorian" age that was starkly different from what had come before. Anti-victorianism has largely been studied in the context of early twentieth century writers like those of the Bloomsbury Group - Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, T. S. Eliot, et al. - who distinguished themselves or who were distinguished by others as being intentionally anti-Victorian, or whose pro-Victorian sentiments need to be examined beyond simply being considered conservatism. These writers generally came of age around the turn of the century, spent their childhoods in middle- or upper-class Victorian households, and went on to become an educated, elite group that conspicuously spurned the mores and standards of their parents' generation, which to them represented the whole of the Victorian era despite being a highly skewed view of the entire period and all of the people in it. This backlash coexisted, however, with a nostalgia for (depending on one's age) the period of one's childhood or one's parents' childhood. You can compare this to the modern view of the 1950s - to some people, that decade is a time of backward social views and overly restrictive clothing, and to others, it's a glorious haven of innocence and beauty.

Aesthetically, the 1890s represented a lot of things that wouldn't and possibly couldn't come back. The dominant mainstream decorative arts movement was Art Nouveau, characterized by shapes in wood, stone, metal, and textiles with sinuous curves and unexpected proportions; while only the affluent could afford seriously art nouveau pieces for their homes, influence from it could be found in more mundane, utilitarian furniture and advertising/object packaging for the masses. Even when avant-garde artists like the Impressionists or Post-Impressionists rejected straightforwardly representational art, they still created works that involved great attention to detail and were clearly representing something. Women's clothing during the day was enveloping, generally involving a high collar, sleeves with a varying degree of fullness, a firmly-shaped figure, and long skirts, typically stiffened a bit at the hem in order to stand out; among women who were in a position to wear evening dress, that followed the same general lines and was often ornate and very well-made.

By contrast, the following decades had a very different material culture. "Smooth, streamlined, and geometric" essentially describes Art Deco and related early-twentieth-century styles like Bauhaus or Wiener Werkstatte: with no relationship to Art Nouveau's organic forms, or to previous artistic movements, they were completely modern. More and more abstracted artistic styles like Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism looked senseless and undetailed to many viewers. Women's dress was more lightweight and flimsy, covering less of the body and worn over fewer and more flexible undergarments; ready-made dresses were more available and common than ever before, helping to bring in a standard of looser and less precise fit. From about 1915 to 1930, the fashionable female figure was a lightly-shaped tube, and even when a more shapely form came into vogue again, it didn't seem quite as emphatic as the corseted one. (I've written about views of the Victorian corset during this period here.)

So, aesthetically, these eras are pretty much opposites, just as the 1950s and today are. If someone didn't like the modern aesthetic, the clearest place for them to turn to find a "better" one (more to their traditionalist taste) was the 1890s.