You have so overthought this, that it isn't even funny, heebie.
I really, really like thinking about fashion.
You're basically right, but maybe men's clothes have been more stable? Grownup/non-fashiony men, the differences in clothes are pretty subtle since the '80s Wall Street suspenders went away.
Some things happened -- a lot of office jobs went from suit to business casual in that period -- but the business casual clothes are stuff that the 1990s guy would have had in his closet, even if he didn't wear it to work except on casual Friday. And if he wears a suit, I think a 1990 suit would look dead normal today, while a 1970 suit would have been more likely to look weird in 1990.
Teen/young adult/fashiony clothes have changed; hair and beards have changed in that age bracket. But for an adult employed guy, I think he's only really needed to buy clothes when his old stuff got stained or worn out.
The wrong layer is being examined. Tattoos and pubic hair fashion are epoch markers.
A 1970s suit would have looked slightly weird in 1990, but there were a lot of men who didn't have to wear suits very often, who'd pull them out for a wedding or Christmas party or whatever. They wouldn't have paired them with an outrageous wide tie, and it would have looked a little frumpy.
Same with a 1990 suit today - it will look a little puffy in weird places, like around the chest, and I can't keep track of the double-breasted/single breasted trends, but I think that back then double-breasted was in, which will look a little strange today.
4. I think men's clothes have been more stable, but they were in the past also. Except for the high waist and the unremovable cigarette smell, some men's clothes from the 1920s wouldn't look that out of place for most periods of the past 80 years.
Men's clothes have been stable over the past 80 years if you're the type of man who mostly wears stable fashions, and there are a lot who do. If you're trendier, you have to change it up more.
I was picking out what to wear for that comment.
I'm wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt, just like I've worn every day since about 1996.
6.1: Mmm. I think a '70s suit would have had a much greater risk of being made of a visibly odd fabric, or of being in a bright (by menswear standards) color or loud pattern. Contrasting stitching? Some people might have been able to wear 70's suits into the 90's, but that would have been if they'd lucked out by shopping on the conservative end of the spectrum in the 70's. Lots of 70's suits, you simply wouldn't leave the house in twenty years later.
I think the double-breasted thing ended with the suspenders in the 80s (probably still available in 1990, but on the way out) and other than that almost any grownup men's clothes from 1990 wouldn't look strange at all today. Maybe color palette for things other than suiting fabrics -- I'm bad at visualizing that sort of thing.
I think the fact that we both picked 80 years shows there is a fairly clear break for when men's clothes turned "modern."
watch an 80s or early 90s movie and notice how incredibly ridiculous everyone looks. geena davis in a tower of curls and a denim overalls dress in beetlejuice? even seinfeld looks weird in that respect. and it's true that women's clothes have changed more than mens', but, miami vice much? double-breasted suits with shoulder padding more appropriate for an offensive lineman than a lawyer? and the tight baby T's with baggy pants vs. slouchy tops over leggings is an unassailable point.
in unrelated news, the method by which my merc friend plans to take everybody out is his police baton. he was "joking" of course. I think he does need to join the aid mercenary drama club.
8: Thing is, my dad is pretty darn dull, and I remember some weird 70s suits. I think the weird got mainstream for a bit there.
Lots of 70's suits, you simply wouldn't leave the house in twenty years later.
My dad had a green suit from about 1976 that he would drag out only on St. Patrick's Day. The man is color blind, so I don't think he could tell how dated the shade of green was. Everybody else was drunk so I don't think they noticed either.
The plaid suits of the 70s are over-remembered because they're so dazzlingly strange. There were plenty of ordinary brown and gray suits, as well, with bigger lapels. In a group picture from the 70s, 2 in 10 men would have great amounts of plaid, which makes the whole photo look nuts. Another three of them will be wearing something that wouldn't age well - light denim suit, the big stitching, etc. But all five of those men are men that like buying trendy stuff. The other five are reaching for stuff that looks more normal.
watch an 80s or early 90s movie and notice how incredibly ridiculous everyone looks.
Can I pick Die Hard? That was a great movie.
Also, the thesis that the mid-70s has uniquely bizarre fashion is a very different statement from the thesis that the past 20 years have been bizarrely stagnant.
17: Mostly what I'm saying is that if someone handed an officey guy a closetful of randomly selected '70s suits and told him to get dressed and look normal, he might be able to do it, but he'd have to pick and choose through the options. 1990's suits? He could get dressed in the dark.
19: But if you go back before the 70's you start getting into hats, which are a real difference.
You and alamedia are both high. Nobody would think anything about Geena Davis' dress in Beetlejuice today that they didn't think back when the movie came out -- it was deliberately frumpy then. No one would think anything of Elaine from Seinfeld and the way she dressed.
17: It wasn't just the plaid ones that looked stupid. I can remember our civics teacher trying to explain about Watergate and not being able to get us to stop laughing at the suits of the congressmen. This would have been maybe a dozen years later.
19 to 25, too.
Also, I can't figure out what 24 is arguing with.
For example, the original Footloose looks amazingly modern. Nobody is wearing anything that you'd think of as being soooo 1984.
No, I haven't got a good eye for this and even I can tell Elaine from Seinfeld would look odd today. Not very very odd, but odd. Shoulder pads; higher-contrast makeup, other stuff I can't recall. Trust me, pull her out of context and she'd pop out a crowd as strangely dressed.
27 to what I think 24 is arguing with.
@14
I was watching a Seinfeld episode last night and it's true that - especially Jerry - looked uncontemporary in a way that was hard to place.
Movies and TV are probably misleading in terms of how radically fashion changes over the short/medium term. Most people don't have teams of professionals designing their wardrobe for them.
I see people dressed like Elaine every day. Every day, heebie.
26: Walt is disagreeing with you by saying that things have been totally stagnant since Seinfeld and Beetlejuice; fashions haven't changed a bit.
The difference between the 50s and the 60s is bigger than the difference over the last 20 years.
Today, like pretty much every day for the past 30 years where the temperature got below 60 or so, I am wearing blue jeans and a sweater. However, I can dig to the back of my closet and pull out many 20-year-old sweaters that would look very funny today (why hello there, Dr. Huxtable!) that I wore without a hint of irony 20 years ago.
31: And in the early 1990s, there were plenty of people still wearing frumpy 1980 clothes. People tend to stop updating their look when they have kids.
I'm arguing with you, heebie. Since you are the only person in this discussion other than alameida who's high, I thought that would be perfectly clear.
The difference between the 50s and the 60s is bigger than the difference over the last 20 years.
No way. When you think of the 60s, you're actually thinking of the 70s, if you're claiming this.
Sally was just asking to me to explain Madonna and how she was similar to and different from Lady Gaga. This is really not in my area of expertise, but with the internet on my phone I could show her the poster for Desperately Seeking Susan ("See, in the 80's, an outfit included many, many, many garments. You were trying to see how many different things you could wear at the same time.")
The wrong layer is being examined. Tattoos and pubic hair fashion are epoch markers.
You don't have to be that old to remember when pubic hair didn't even have fashions.
36: You seem to be arguing that Geena Davis looked as frumpy in 1992 as she would now. She did, but not bizarrely quiverfull like she would look now. I think she wears dresses with Peter Pan collars and lace bibs, for pete's sake. She would look like granny going to Bible study now.
I saw the movie in the theater, and I thought she looked like she was an extra who wandered in from a farm.
When you think of the 60s, you're actually thinking of the 70s, if you're claiming this.
For a definition of the 70s which lasted from 68 to 83, this is true.
37: There was a prissy/sexy strain of fashion that was 60's, not 70's, but was very very different from the 50's. Miniskirts and pillbox hats: that's 64/65.
41: She did. I can't tell what your point is. That super-frumpy wear ages well? That Granny from Hee-Haw would have looked wildly differently frumpy, whereas Geena Davis looks recognizably frumpy? To that I say: 19!
When I was at my daughter's Homecoming dance, the dresses were very different from the ones worn 20 years ago.
Suits and ties probably arent horribly different. They are in a skinny fit phase right now, but I am not sure that it is horribly different.
43: Sure, there are differences. But the prissiness is enough to assert that the 50s-60s changed more than the 90s-00s?
The whole Beetlejuice discussion is a red herring. That movie is of late 1980's vintage, not early 90's, and obviously so. The argument is that the statis set in on or about January 1992.
When I was at my daughter's Homecoming dance, the dresses were very different from the ones worn 20 years ago.
Homecoming dresses, coordinated outfits for family photos, and nightclub wear all tend to be occasions where people try to look cutting edge, and so have a shorter shelf life.
Actually Beetlejuice is helpful, because it defies so much of our cliched notions about the 80s. Winona Ryder's all black and spiky bangs? The bohemian artsy-fartsy hosts? Beetle-juice's red/black/white circus goth?
None of that is the bubble-gum pop that has become the cemented narrative about the 80s.
Sally was just asking to me to explain Madonna and how she was similar to and different from Lady Gaga.
Please stress that Lady Gaga has a respectable vocal technique and sound musicianship and plays at least one instrument quite competently and has an ability to modulate her musical style! I don't even like Lady Gaga all that much but for some reason I always get very het up, or rather the opposite, about this comparison.
||
Well, stats class, I didn't like you, and it's hard to imagine that you liked me. But now we're done with each other. So, goodbye.
|>
In other words, we get these narratives about the decades that have a grain of truth, but mask over a gigantic amount of variation.
51: I'm finishing the final work in my class right now.
52: Make Sifu model the variation.
53.2: I have another stats class next semester, not to worry.
Also!!! How can anyone claim a "First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History" without setting off your bullshit detector? When is the argument "Change has come to an end, with our current situation" ever been right?
BTW, thanks to repeated viewings of Kung Fu Panda and the name, I now hear your comments in Dustin Hoffman's voice.
Winona Ryder's all black and spiky bangs?
True, but wasn't Winona Ryder (or rather, her costume designers) was a big influence on 90's young women's fashion? In that case, she doesn't look dated because people were going to be imitating her in a few years.
56 to 54. I hear heebie-geebie's comments in Ian McKellan's voice.
When is the argument "Change has come to an end, with our current situation" ever been right?
It's always right!
46: No, the 'prissy' was meant to differentiate it from the '70s. Not hippie clothes, but sexy in a way that would have looked like future space-clothes in the 50's.
57: Sure, but my point was that our over-generalizations are not accurate at all. Nobody imitated BeetleJuice until the 00s, and nobody has ever imitated the host couple.
the bubble-gum pop that has become the cemented narrative about the 80s
Huh. When I envision the narrative of the 1980s, it's much more stadium rock (e.g., Springsteen, U2, R.E.M., Prince, Guns n Roses, AC/DC) and hair metal than bubble-gum pop.
61. Ok. The 50s-60s is still not markedly more changing than the 90s-00s.
55: Calling it a "Great Paradox" is wrong. But it's not self-evidently false (it could be actually false, like, I'm arguing but you're mostly convincing me that you're right) that fashion could be changing less over the last two decades than it had for the sixty years before that.
So speaking as somebody who wore completely absurd raver clothes for a while in the late '90s, the linked article is nonsensical. Also, dudes with beards.
Also... yeah, ridiculous. I'm on Team Heebie, even though I didn't read the post. Go Team Heebie!
I wonder if confounding variable starting in the 90's is that when we ask ourselves what the current fashion is, we're now thinking less about dressy au courant stuff (plaid suits) and more about everyday schloppy stuff (flannel).
Heebie, when was the great shift of women's hair from big/fluffy to against-the-head? I've been wondering this ever since Twin Peaks.
When I envision the narrative of the 1980s, it's much more stadium rock (e.g., Springsteen, U2, R.E.M., Prince, Guns n Roses, AC/DC) and hair metal than bubble-gum pop.
This is insane. Or maybe it's just what you were listening to? As opposed to Debbie Gibson, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Lionel Richie, Tiffany, Madonna, NKOTB, the Bangles and all these other musicians I'm reading off Wikipedia?
64: I don't think so. I think if a woman walked down the street in 1959 in a Mary Quant mini circa 1964, people would have thrown a blanket over her -- she would have been literally shocking.
The confounding variable is observer age, as ever.
Not hippie clothes, but sexy in a way that would have looked like future space-clothes in the 50's.
Not really, IIRC. Certainly an identifiable style, but clearly developed from what went before in a way that 70s styling, which was all about mainstream appropriation of what had previously been counter-cultural stuff, wasn't.
Also, most people in the 60s didn't dress like Julie Christie. If they could afford it they dressed like Mary Tyler Moore. It was said, wisely, that the 60s was experienced by 2000 people in London. Probably and additional 2000 each in New York and LA and that's it.
67: Early 90s. Whenever Working Girl came out -- Melanie Griffiths has huge hair, and it marks her as low-class and behind the times. Her hair gets smaller as she gets more reputable.
I really hate that movie.
63. What? The 1980s were postpunk and house, surrounded by asymmetric haircuts, members only jackets and parachute pants. They started in a drug-addled haze and ended in obsessive months-long jags of physics and programming. I don't know what the rest of you people are talking about.
This is insane.
Best selling albums from the 1980s:
1. Michael Jackson - Thriller
2. AC/DC - Back in Black
3. Springsteen - Born in the USA
4. Guns n' Roses - Appetite for Destruction
5. Phil Collins - No Jacket Required
6. Whitney Houston - Whitney Houston
7. Prince - Purple Rain
8. Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
9. Springsteen - Live 1975-1985
10. Def Leppard - Hysteria
11. Bon Jovi - Slippery When Wet
12. Michael Jackson - Bad
13. U2 - The Joshua Tree
14. George Michael - Faith
15. Madonna - Like a Virgin
Only Def Leppard has really stood the test of time.
Young women's belly buttons appeared and then mostly disappeared during the period of interest. Ass antlers became a thing, and piercings became much less fringe. My prediction is that in twenty years having facial tattoos will no longer disqualify a person from working anywhere but a tattoo parlor or strip joint. Men will still be able to get away with boring slacks and jacket and the only way to tell which decade they are from will be their tie.
The confounding variable is observer age, as ever.
I'll note that in 1985, I turned 17 and heebie turned 7.
piercings became much less fringe.
This one amuses me. The punk look is so similar to the punky kids I was friends with in high school, except back then if you wanted metal through your face you did it yourself with a safety pin, by god. Uphill, both ways, in the snow.
You know everyone's personal fucking narrative is not the narrative of the motherfucking narrative of the culture (if there even is one). When *my* revolution comes first up against the wall will be the Big Chill-ers and marketers and retro Classic Rock and other mainstream usurpers of the past (also the fallen political paradise mcmanus's of the world), but all of you lot would be next. Go do a VH-1 special or something--it really is a grating form of Heatherism.
</hey you kids get off my personal experience of the world>
That said, togolosh is on to something with the tatoos.
If they could afford it they dressed like Mary Tyler Moore.
She wore some skirts that would have been shocking in the 50s. They didn't come across as shocking on her, but it was because fashion really had changed.
The important thing is the staying power of beards and corduroy.
don't think so. I think if a woman walked down the street in 1959 in a Mary Quant mini circa 1964, people would have thrown a blanket over her -- she would have been literally shocking.
Sure, but she could have worn that in 1920, and only looked a little strange. The 1950s are unusually prudish.
78: I'm not finding it on a quick google, but there was a scale I encountered back in the 1990s. It was published earlier, but I can't remember when. It was a scale for measuring "lifestyle criminality" and having more than two tattoos was one of the indicators that crime was a lifestyle for this person.
In which decade were teal deer in fashion?
85: I'm mostly on your side here, but that seems very wrong.
That much leg wasn't even what you see in swimsuits from the 1920s.
88: It's probably wrong. But girls in the 1920s showed a scandalous amount of skin, by 1950s standards.
85: Don't think so. The 1920's shockingly short skirt showed kneecap, not thigh.
Oh, I was just saying fashionwise, a-line miniskirts weren't in fashion in the 20s, because it tended to be the short sheaths. Skinwise, there was a lot of skin shown.
The difference between 1910s and 1920s is gigantic; I think if you really wanted to assert a changing fashion scene, you'd go there.
90: Not really. Different shape skirts, but you could have worn a knee-length skirt in the 50s. You'd look dated in 1920s clothes, but not exposing anything really unusual.
The received narrative of the 80s definitely seems to me to be about hair metal. I have very few clear relevant memories of the 80s, except for liking the song "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys, so I assume my impressions of the decade reflect the gestalt view of it in pop culture. Hair metal, jean jackets, shoulderpads.
Maybe. But cheerleaders have worn bloomers forever. There are always contexts where underwear-coverage is okay.
90, 92: Not really by any later standard.
93: Yes, but that is a different claim.
My image of the 80s music is probably skewed to the bubble-gum because of my age. Nevertheless. I'm right about fashion.
There are always contexts where underwear-coverage is okay.
I keep my underwear covered by my pants, but the kids today with the drop-bottom baggy pants....
Yeah, I've been arguing (brief due Friday), but I think you're basically right.
Mostly, I think that what makes fashion look stable over the past twenty years is that the people talking about it remember twenty years ago, so it doesn't look ridiculous yet. Elaine from Seinfeld looks weirder to you than to me, because I was a grownup who should have been dressing like her at the time.
Or maybe it's just what you were listening to?
No, by then I was in a never-ending quest to be hipper and more obscure than everybody else and spent my nights listening to college radio and jazz.
Mostly, I think that what makes fashion look stable over the past twenty years is that the people talking about it remember twenty years ago, so it doesn't look ridiculous yet.
Right. The age of the author, as Tweety noted, or maybe he was talking about me.
And when the author "remembers" 20 years ago, he's falsely remembering the clothes in his closet that he'd still wear, and conveniently forgetting the items which would now be cut bizarrely, but have big traits which seem reasonable, like "blue shirt".
For a very 1990s movie with recognizably 'old fashioned' fashion - Clueless.
Of note - the giant parallelogram-ish cell phone; the very angular red convertible; belly shirts (as mentioned above those have come and gone) with or without belly-chains; smooth hair on women (either left down or pulled back in headache inducing ponytails); baggy pants and backward hats on guys who would now be hipsters. The colours are generally brighter and less green/yellow tinged than now but that might also be because the movie is set in California. Also remember brown lip liner with like reddish lipstick? That is so 1990s to me (while wearing a baby doll dress with a white t-shirt under it and knock-off Docs).
Seinfeld looks like he's from another era because of the high waisted jeans and the giant white sneakers.
||
Has anything about this campaign season been better than the Bad Lip Reading clips? Newt's turn.
|>
They've been spending most their lives
Living in a pastime paradise
They've been wasting most their lives
Glorifying days long gone behind
Excuse me, this thread is remembering me of Mary Beth K, who wore the first HS miniskirt and wore it well
Linked article is dead on, although the 20s and 60s didn't have fashion, they had anarchy
101, 104: Yes. From that obituary, Death, Hoban predicted in 2002, would "be a good career move". "People will say, 'yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let's look at him again'," he said.
100:You wear underwear?
Look, has anyone mentioned, explicitly, the rapidity and degree of fashion or cultural change depends on the depth, breadth, and granularity of the observation and the involvement of the observer?
I mean shit, man, the differences between each and every Beatles album was fucking revolutionary, man, like Rubber Soul to Revolver was like Bach to Schoenberg, dig it.
Whenever Working Girl came out -- Melanie Griffiths has huge hair, and it marks her as low-class and behind the times.
This was in 1988, BTW.
If nothing else, the fact that this conversation is being had, and preserved in black and white, is useful for future reference.
If the people of 2051 and beyond are wondering whether the world of fashion has been stagnant since 2031, or whether it merely appears that way because the fashions of 2031 were too recent to adequately judge, it would be helpful to know that people were worrying about the same thing in 2011.
Conversely, if we could find a transcript of cultured people from 1971 worrying that patterns in clothing hadn't changed much since 1971 (which seems like a plausible conversation to have had), I think that would be dispositive that this is the kind of thing people are always disposed to fret about.
That last "1971" should be "1951" of course.
and preserved in black and white
Usenet started in the early 90s, didn't it? So there's a record of what computer-oriented academics thought about fashion form back then, archived somewhere.
Less so now than in the early 90s, but that was probably a peculiarly ill-chosen group to opine on fashion.
Here's a little slice of life from 1992 (specifically, a scene from the Clinton-Gore campaign bus tour). There is precious little in that scene that clearly marks it as a different era from 2011. Hillary and Tipper probably wouldn't wear those outfits today, but other women might, and they wouldn't look notably out of place. Bill and Al look the same, but for weight gain and the effects of age. The random people in the crowd look reasonably contemporary, except that no one is fiddling with a smart phone. The only thing that really gives it away is that the SUV's are a little more angular (they hadn't really come into vogue yet as a minivan substitute).
117: Which the Library of Congress should seize from Google via eminent domain. They couldn't fuck it up worse.
There's a difference between cutting-edge, TV fashion and what ordinary non-fashionable people are wearing, which tends to lag a few years behind, and which also skews this discussion. TV I wouldn't take as a good guide to reality at all in most cases, because decisions of costuming aren't always going to be made with an eye to capturing what was typical of the time period.
I suspect, however, that the author of the post is in his mid-to-late thirties, and what he's noticed is that he's found some kind of style or uniform that he personally hasn't had to change since 1992 in order to be reasonably well-dressed, if not cutting edge.
119: Oh whatever. Look at Reagan's commercials from 1980. Politics in fashion are the most conservative end of the spectrum.
119.--Hilary's outfit is pretty close to modern, but Tipper's dress is laughably bad now.
I suspect, however, that the author of the post is in his mid-to-late thirties,
If only. I am the same age as apo and LizardBreath. (The author of the original article is in his mid-fifties).
...and what he's noticed is that he's found some kind of style or uniform that he personally hasn't had to change since 1992 in order to be reasonably well-dressed, if not cutting edge.
This is correct. The clothes I bought in 1992-95 I could still wear today, if I lost 25 pounds.
Although it would have lasted much longer on a politician than on anyone else. Those primary-color shoulder-padded suits and dresses are all over the State of the Union in the shots of Congress, and I'm not sure why.
he's found some kind of style or uniform that he personally hasn't had to change since 1992
Ironically, uniforms have probably changed a lot more than civilian dress over this period. The only bit of kit that was issued in 2003 and is still issued is the ID disc. Everything else has been overhauled, often more than once. Police uniforms have undergone a lot of changes too - mostly in a more military direction.
Also, this, from the original post--pants are tight as can be, all the way down to the ankle--is a trend whose time has passed. (Thank God.) This sort of thing was the trend this last summer. We'll see where it goes from here.
and what he's noticed is that he's found some kind of style or uniform that he personally hasn't had to change since 1992 in order to be reasonably well-dressed, if not cutting edge.
That would be some sartorially advanced 18-year-old.
123: Reagan's look is close to timeless (with the exception of the tie), but the visible bystanders are clearly from another era, which is not the case in the Clinton clip.
125: If he's in his mid-fifties I think that's more support for thinking this is about age and life, not a lack of a change in fashion. I can't go around wearing what I wore in 1995 and if I did it would look dated, but that's just a function of age and target markets for fashion.
I think it would be stronger comparing television show to television show, and I think if you pick a typical show in 1992 and one in 2011, no one is going to be confused about which show is from the early 90s, and the tells will be clothes, hair, and (especially) makeup.
primary-color shoulder-padded suits and dresses
It must have something to do with visibility on tv amid a crowd of dark suits. Also, the dark suits that a lot of politicians wear seem to be deliberately rumply and poorly cut; maybe these unflattering, blocky dresses and skirt-suits are the female equivalent.
131.--My favorite example of this is Buffy. The costume designers put her in every bad teenybopper trend from the 90s, and you could practically date each episode to an exact year from her clothes.
||
127 caused me to re-lookup digital camouflage (discussed here before and used for a longer time), which led me to "Dazzle Camouflage" which could really be something to behold.
|>
||
Embarrassing conversations with a supervisor. "This argument makes no sense." "I think you're absolutely right. Remember when I argued with you because I didn't want to put it in the brief and you told me to anyway?" I really hate those moments when I have to say "I told you so" in order to keep the conversation grounded in reality.
|>
128: I like paper bag pants, but there's this other, weird thing I keep seeing, where the fabric is ultra-thin and generally has a really tiny pattern, and the cut is huge and baggy, which looks completely insane to me.
And when I say "I keep seeing" I mean online, because Heebie U has the most conventional, boring fashion ever. When I'm at local State U, it's a dazzling fashion show by contrast. Heebie U selects for conformists, or something.
136: MC Hammer would like to differ.
133: I think you have to put yourself in the mind of an observer from say 2050 or so. Are they differences that will be judged as differences from that distance, the way 1959 vs. 1972 would be or 1913 vs. 1925?
128, 136: Oh, thank god. Trying to keep a rapidly growing girl in skintight jeans is maddening -- if loose pants get normal, they might fit for a little longer.
But I need loose jeans specifically -- her school has a uniform of a school shirt and blue jeans. If literal jeans stay tight, looser other pants don't help.
138: They're not genie pants, but they are insane in that way. Who's the 1990 tabloid fodder who was known for those pants? Not Lorena Bobbitt's husband, but the one who had the affair with Amy something.
129: Eh, add seven years to the age and I think I'm right. A guy who thinks he's fashionable in 1992 for wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a flannel shirt thinks he's not out of place in 2011 for wearing similar clothes, but chances are the cuts are a little bit difference, he's wearing different shoes, and he's no longer extremely sensitive to trends in fashion or the target market.
133: So true, especially in the early seasons.
The Nineties are quite identifiable in retrospect. There were some goddamned ugly clothes in the Nineties. The period when "grunge" fashion was in is cringingly distinctive and memorable for me. Then there were eight ball jackets, fades, the Charleston reconstituted as a hip-hop dance move. A brutal period in the early decade when all of this collided with late hair-metal band fashion and early skater fashion. The rise of ultra-baggy jeans in blinding neon colours, the diffusion of rave culture, people running around sucking on baby soothers; and in hip-hop the parallel rise of gangsta fashion as interpreted by MTV. "Goth" fashion at its height, and through it all a thread of fashionable Seventies retro.
The Seventies retro has since been replaced with Eighties retro, which -- as much as I hated the original Eighties -- I have to grudgingly admit has it virtues, even if it is epitomized and most fully developed by an "emo" subculture that seems strikingly hollow and banal even by the historical standards of pop music subcultures. Locally at least, grunge seems to be recurring in a weird way that involves looking like you just rolled out of bed and put on a shirt and a toque. The modern "hipster" of the oughties mashed up various looks, and recycled and transformed combinations of the suit, hip-hop fashion and the full spectrum of cheesy Eighties fashion, in visually distinctive ways.
Cars, advertising, music have all changed markedly in the same period. The rise of the Internet and the mobile communications era is hugely visible in pop culture, making the early Nineties and the fashionability of pagers as an accessory look quaint.
So I don't think the decades are "static" in any way. Far from it. And of course fashion has never been homogenous. What is true, however, is that popular culture has gotten more heterogenous over time. Clear subcultural trends have gotten harder to identify, and it's gotten much, much harder for one single "look" to predominate.
While the broad claim that fashioned hasn't changed at all is obviously dumb, I do think there's maybe something to the claim that there's an ebb and flow in terms of rapid changes in mainstream fashion, and that the last 15 years or so have been a bit more samey than some other 15 year periods one could pick from the past century or so. And probably less samey than others.
What is true, however, is that popular culture has gotten more heterogenous over time.
I bet it feels as homogeneous to 7th graders today as it did to 7th graders in 1998, 1988, 1978 and 1968. I bet it feels as diverse to 40 year olds today as it did in each of those years.
140.--How specific is this rule? Here are some loose-fitting chinos that come in navy blue.These are pretty awesome, but pricey.
Seinfeld's apartment gives it away as early 90's (actually more like mid-80s) : everything is painted medium gray.
There's something to Lord C's last. That lots of overlapping little subcultures which are much less purist and defined with respect to each other makes for a broader pop cultural scene in which no one look/sound/style is able to predominate for a period of time.
146: There's been an accretion of subcultures over the decades since the rise of mass culture that means there are more and more "looks" to cannibalize from the past, combine and modernize. Find a sweet spot in this morass and it can carry you quite a ways.
||
135: Embarrassing conversations with a supervisor.
In my new not-yet-acclimated-to-by-me org structure the right answer in this type of conversation (usually with my sup's sup, though) is to forget grounding the discussion in reality and quietly make the change. I have learned this several times over. Not so happy in my work at the moment.
|>
149 gets it right. Then tan takes over.
Let's not forget that Knecht is in Boston, where everyone is deeply unfashionable and underneath like 11 layers of clothing. Also I don't think that "preppy" has changed very much since about 1960, except for becoming affirmatively fashionable recently.
Men's fashion changes slowly and subtly but it sure does change. I can't tell you why, exactly, a man in a 1996 suit looks frumpy and badly dressed by today's standards, but its true (just looked at pictures of me in a suit circa 1996 to confirm). But i think the same slow change is true for suits for all periods from about 1930 to now. The slow change phenomenon is true, but even more so, for business casual; if you're dressing like you did in 1996, there's something slightly off. Which suggests that you can indeed "get away" with the same clothes for longer as a professional guy, but you'll increasingly look dorky over time.
149. Guess what? I know three or four people who are painting their places medium grey all over again, right now.
(I forgot in 145 the rise of retro-swingers, as typified in the movie Swingers, and their associated martini bars. God the Nineties were a tacky decade, really.)
Cala understates the point: actors are costumed to make a point about the character, and Clueless is a fine example of this. She was supposed to look ridiculous. Elaine is supposed to be out of fashion. If you want to see what the culture is doing, you don't look at TV or movies, or MTV for God's sake, you look at crowd shots of regular people.
I generally agree with the stated thesis. But understand it to be about matters of degree: a crowd shot in 1962 and 1972 would be very different, and instantly recognizable even to me, one from 2002 and today might be different is some small ways, but you'd have to be looking very closely, or some kind of specialist to see it. (Eg, I wouldn't notice Seinfeld's waste or shoes as out of place).
155: Yes. That slate gray is what everyone is babbling about on the design sites.
Elaine is supposed to be out of fashion.
No she wasn't. She was dressed completely reasonably. There was no running gag about her being poorly dressed.
"Dazzle Camouflage" which could really be something to behold.
Interestingly, not meant to hide the ship - which is tricky when it's in motion because, you know, wake - but to make it difficult to tell its size and heading, which you need to know in order to shoot at it accurately.
Or, alternatively, to protect the ship by giving enemy rangetakers crippling migraine headaches.
148: Jeans, not blue pants. And there's a price limit -- I can't remember what it is because I don't usually come close, but the linked jeans are forbidden as too expensive. (I mean, they almost certainly wouldn't notice or bust her for it, but there is a rule -- they don't want the kids competing on fashion.)
But if expensive loose jeans exist, cheap ones will real soon now. (I mean, there are loose jeans -- she owns a pair of boys 501s that aren't skintight -- but she resists wearing them. Once they're in fashion, she'll wear them.)
re: 160
The 'Blast!' exhibition at Tate Britain earlier this year had some examples of dazzle-stuff. It's remarkably similar [not unexpectedly] to a lot of the Vorticist paintings.
Oooh, counter-surveillance dazzle makeup.
Glamourflage!
http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2010/03/31/computer-vision-dazzle-makeup/
Not supposed to be fashion forward, is what I meant and should have written.
re: 156
There was something a bit sad about that particular swing-revival. The bands largely being shit reheated ex-ska-at-third-hand bands, for example.
For me, though, swing is still one of the most gloriously joyous musical genres thrown up by the 20th century. Modernist, and yet not po-faced, and good to dance to.
155 - this makes me sad.
Depends what they're painting over.
107--right; question recently heard from Younger Person: "was Seinfeld SUPPOSED to be wearing mom jeans"?
164.--Makeup trends in future dystopian SF movies will be exciting!
||
Often the right answer, actually, even in a non-hellish working relationship. But when you're being pressed for "No, really, what was the reasoning behind putting this argument in?" sometimes there's nothing for it but "I was only following orders."
|>
In general, I wish people would have more color in their interior decorating. But people tend to be super commitment-phobic about color in their homes. If nothing else, have plants.
Our last paint job was the first time I ever intentionally painted a room a color other than off-white/very pale buff. Our bedroom's yellow, and the kids' rooms are pale blue. I love them.
I'd still be jumpy about a color in the living room, though.
Or, alternatively, to protect the ship by giving enemy rangetakers crippling migraine headaches.
In the 60s this was known as Op Art.
We have an awesome print of a dazzle camouflage design hanging in our kitchen.
Also if you're interested in the stuff in 164 this link has better pictures.
(Eg, I wouldn't notice Seinfeld's waste or shoes as out of place).
The waste, at least, doesn't change too much.
The biggest difference in women's fashion is that in the 1990s, tops were tight
Now that you mention it, there were those diaphanous blouses...
I'm pretty much 100% with heebie on all of this. You might think you're wearing, say, the same khakis-blueshirt-shoes combo that you were 20 years ago, but unless they are actually 20-year-old clothes, each of those elements is slightly different now. You don't even have to be attempting to be on trend, it's just what's available for purchase.
I don't think anyone is disputing the thing in 178. I'd bet in 1953 there were subtle differences in cut and detailing from the suits being worn in 1955, and again 56 and so on, such that a 1950 suit and a 1959 suit would be somewhat different and people at the time would probably have known the difference. But there's still be a much bigger difference between 1959 and 1968 than between 1950 and 59.* Fashion doesn't change at a uniform constant rate, and the fact that there are always some changes, and those changes in turn may be more noticeable to people who pay attention, doesn't necessarily make it false that the last few years have been somewhat homogeneous as far as mundane ordinary-not-especially-young-person clothes go.
* Explicitly not mentioning 50s women's clothes because of the 'New Look' and shit.
I have 15 year old shirts that I still wear regularly. I also wear suits from 1996 whenever I have to wear a suit.
Not "regularly" I guess. Anything I wear regularly doesn't last more than four or five years.
Not that I'm endorsing the 'this has been a completely static decade and no-one could tell what year someone was from' claim. Which is bullshit.
My favorite suit is from 1998. The lining's all shot to hell -- I can't really take the jacket off in public. But I love it.
Both 178 and 179 seem right.
There's a decent case to be made that all of popular culture has become less innovative since about 1995, including film, music, fashion, and design, as we've become increasingly obsessed with reviving the past instead of celebrating the new. I think that's the thesis of this book.
You might think you're wearing, say, the same khakis-blueshirt-shoes combo that you were 20 years ago, but unless they are actually 20-year-old clothes, each of those elements is slightly different now.
You're knocking down a strawman. Andersen didn't claim there are no differences, just that the differences are meaningfully less salient than in the past -- that 1992 and 2011 are aesthetically and stylistically more similar than in any other 20 year period in the last half century at least. Without completely endorsing all his argument, I still think that claim is plausible.
Pwned on so many levels. Uggh.
In the 1960s, they didn't have pwnages with multiple levels.
The look I never expected to see revived was towering heels on women for daytime. Maybe this is because I grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by hippies, but I really thought that inevitable human progress would have us all wearing nice Danskos or Vibrams or whatever in the future. Instead, half the young women on the subway are wearing shit like this.
There's a decent case to be made that all of popular culture has become less innovative since about 1995, including film, music, fashion, and design, as we've become increasingly obsessed with reviving the past instead of celebrating the new. I think that's the thesis of this book.
I just can't stand any "now is fundamentally different!" hypothesis. At least within fashion, I can give you a detailed description of how the 80s are borrowing on various decades, and putting it together in a new way. There was 1960s revivalism, which didn't exactly capture the 60s in any sense, because it was these dippy comic sans style daisies and peace signs. For example. There were gunny sack waistless dresses, as noted with Geena Davis. There are big, grafitti-ish prints, which are pop art ish. Etc.
178 -- And I don't think the 'slightly different' nature of things contradicts the central thesis. It's that they are not as radically different as they would be in other periods.
This is like the Xmas music thing. It's not that there's no new Xmas music. It is the case, though, that I hear a whole lot more 40+ year old music in public places now than I did in 1971. Or pop music. This is really astonishing to me: I think about what I might have heard at the bottom of a ski lift, or in the kind of bar I go to, or a restaurant that has music: the percentage from 65-73 is immeasurably greater than the percentage from 1930-1940 that I heard in, say, 1978. (Yes, sure, there were special venues where one might hear old blues, for instance. I'm not talking about special venues, but ordinary public spaces.)
In some ways, it's a comfort, to have the sights and sounds of formative years. It's kind of sad too.
Yes, like with the Xmas music thread, one can pick at the edges, and find overstatements in the various formulations. It is still quite jarring for someone who lived through the relative lack of 30s/40s music in the 70s to think how long a shadow 70s music casts today. In clothing, the relative stasis comes a little later -- I suppose that's age related.
It's that they are not as radically different as they would be in other periods.
Yeah, but I think this is just plain wrong.
189: I just can't stand any "now is fundamentally different!" hypothesis.
But perhaps you should. That it is obviously true that all prior decades borrowed from prior prior decades does not necessarily mean that borrowing always occurred to the same extents or over the same range of diversity.
The strangest 25% of the 90s are all completely absent nowadays, and would look totally nuts. The most conventional 25% of the 90s would look just fine. I bet this ratio is constant in any decade compared to the 30 year period surrounding it.
Hmmm... how much would you bet?
I just can't stand any "now is fundamentally different!" hypothesis.
I'm sympathetic to this as a rule of thumb, but it's a rule of thumb, not a law of nature. Like, what Charley says about music is absolutely true. I wasn't much of a punk in high school but my friends were, and it was a pretty old esthetic then and hasn't changed wildly since. Teen culture in the 50's through 70's or so was a scary new thing that continued to throw out stuff that would freak out people even slightly too old to be in on it. Those kinds of break-lines seem to be gone.
189 -- I think the argument isn't so much that other periods didn't borrow from aspects of other periods, but that they were obsessed with and valorized the new and innovative, whereas since about 1995 it's been cool precisely to be non-innovative and retro.
That does seem to me to capture something quite real about what's happened in popular music; perhaps less so in clothing, but innovation in clothing works somewhat differently from other cultural areas, and I do think that "this is the new look" has been replaced in value with "this is the new super-cool retro look" to some extent even in fashion. Compare the career of say, Gaultier or Christian Dior with the current lines of the major fashion houses. I'm out of my depth in terms of contemporary women's fashion, but something about the thesis rings true.
It's true that certain periods of music get stamped in certain contexts, but it's not true that it's always the 1950s. Nightclubs have a passion for mid-1990s rap, or they did five years ago, at least.
Teen culture in the 50's through 70's or so was a scary new thing that continued to throw out stuff that would freak out people even slightly too old to be in on it.
But this is a gigantic thing to unpack, and is much bigger than that time period. In plenty of ways, the 30s were wildly more liberal than the 50s and 60s, etc. It's more about the ebb and flow of religious fundamentalism, no? And that certainly has an element today.
I don't think the 'slightly different' nature of things contradicts the central thesis
Eh, I haven't read the article, so I don't really know what I'm supposed to be arguing against here, but I guess I'm trying to say that those slight differences over 20 years do end up being making things pretty different. (On preview, what h-g says in 191.)
Also, as others have said, the idea of the fashion of an era isn't really defined by everyday clothing. A pair of Z. Cavaricci pants ca. 1990 is radically different from a pair of 2010 Thom Browne pants. (I chose those two particularly because those styles filtered out into general pants design.)
Okay, but listen to yourself. You're willing to say that some decades were wildly different than others on these measurements -- if that's true, then sometimes the different decade has to be now.
I think the argument isn't so much that other periods didn't borrow from aspects of other periods, but that they were obsessed with and valorized the new and innovative, whereas since about 1995 it's been cool precisely to be non-innovative and retro.
That does seem to me to capture something quite real about what's happened in popular music; perhaps less so in clothing, but innovation in clothing works somewhat differently from other cultural areas, and I do think that "this is the new look" has been replaced in value with "this is the new super-cool retro look" to some extent even in fashion.
I agree the word "retro" appeared circa 1995. But I just can't believe people are fundamentally more or less creative. People have always obsessed about their favorite nostalgiac period. In the 50s, there was the Victorian style to counter all the mod stuff.
191 -- This is because you (and some others here) are a specialist in fashion, and notice small details that someone like me, or the author, wouldn't see.
On music, I'm not saying the modern pop is influenced by Led Zeppelin. I'm saying that I am hearing Led Zeppelin in the mall. Something is happening with that, and it's either (a) a recognition that Led Zeppelin is the zenith of all possible human endeavor or (b) a stasis in cultural tastes that is without precedent in the lifetimes of anyone now alive.
I'm saying that I am hearing Led Zeppelin in the mall.
iPods are great that way.
But I just can't believe people are fundamentally more or less creative
You don't need to believe in a fundamental change in human nature to believe that fashions in clothing and music change different amounts at different times.
(b) a stasis in cultural tastes that is without precedent in the lifetimes of anyone now alive.
And I don't think it would have been weird at all say, pre-1920. The stasis isn't a bizarre new thing, it's a change from the prior period of rapid change.
Okay, but listen to yourself. You're willing to say that some decades were wildly different than others on these measurements -- if that's true, then sometimes the different decade has to be now.
Sure - the 70s were uniquely brightly patterned. The 50s were prudish and fearful of communism. There can be a salient feature to a time period.
My OP is saying that these broad generalizations are dwarfed by the diversity in these decades, and that people are particularly terrible at seeing their current clothes as anything but the epitome of normal.
This is because you (and some others here) are a specialist in fashion, and notice small details that someone like me, or the author, wouldn't see.
First, I assume the author is somewhat of a specialist, since he's writing in Vanity Fair. I just think he's not thinking critically.
But I actually think it's a combination of two things:
1. people remember cliches of a decade, instead of the actual decade clothes
2. people are most tuned into fashion in their teens, and then gradually drift out of fashion.
You don't need to believe in a fundamental change in human nature to believe that fashions in clothing and music change different amounts at different times.
When there are huge industries attracting people who are dying to leave their creative, new stamp on the business?
205 -- I think you sell the 1900-1920 period short, on basic cultural stuff. I'd have to look at a bunch of pictures, though, to venture a guess about clothing styles.
In my lived experience, 194 is wrong. Obviously, a very narrow experience in each decade.
[P]eople are most tuned into fashion in their teens, and then gradually drift out of fashion.
Uh oh.
Huh. When I envision the narrative of the 1980s, it's much more stadium rock tom verlaine and cbgb and stores that sold nothing but bullet-proof outerwear (because cocaine, I guess. Oh, and hello, crack!) and PS1 and all the non-famous old artists getting thrown out of their lofts so investment bankers could buy them, and their horror at having to move to Brooklyn. And then Reagan WTF and perfectly normal people turning into horrifying pretentious yuppies. Anyway, in retrospect, yuck.
There can be a salient feature to a time period.
Okay. So, a possible world is one in which 1950-1960: Fashionable young people find clothes and music from more than ten years ago largely absurd;
1960-1970: same;
1970-1980: same;
1980-1990: same;
1990-2010: different. Old stuff isn't risibly outdated, it's something to mine for style or just keep on using.
This isn't a perfect representation of the world we live in, but there's something to it. What Charley says about music -- I'm forty, and music from when I was a baby ("Sweet Home Alabama"?) is still something kids rock out to unselfconsciously.
In my lived experience, 194 is wrong. Obviously, a very narrow experience in each decade.
Can you describe nightclub fashion from the 90s?
211.1:Yeah, the VF author makes a point of dicussing facial hair on men during the 19th century, something I find amazing.
And the difference between Empire gowns, Victorian Black, and Gilded Age excess is also intense.
Again, I don't think it's that there has been no change; it's that excitement at (wearing, seeing, listening to) the genuinely new has largely been replaced by excitement at curating past trends with exquisite taste.
2. people are most tuned into fashion in their teens, and then gradually drift out of fashion.
For people who were in their teens in the 70s, and lived through the 80s, even if they weren't trying particularly hard to keep up, this really does not capture what was going on.
215 -- Not from personal observation, absolutely not. A narrow experience. But then, that's not what I think the VF author was talking about either.
a stasis in cultural tastes that is without precedent in the lifetimes of anyone now alive
every company party any of you will attend this year will play the same ten 1970's disco songs they played at last year's party - and the party before that, and the party before that... there is no escaping KC & The Sunshine Band.
people are most tuned into fashion in their teens
Now there's an empirically suspect observation.
This is because you (and some others here) are a specialist in fashion, and notice small details that someone like me, or the author, wouldn't see.
Obviously I'm agreement with Heebie here and I think this is the key thing. If you don't pay attention to fashion, i.e. if you (not you you, general you) don't know if you bought your khakis and blue shirt last year or in 2002, then I would predict you have no or little idea of how things have changed.
Although now that I know the article came from Vanity Fair then that kind of goes against my argument somewhat.
I think the other thing is that there are certain 'classic' styles that rich people where that are much less changing. Preppy northeastern stuff. Or Chanel suits. So this guy may not feel fashion has changed significantly in the last 20 years because he's been wearing suits from an expensive store. If you look at what the kids are wearing, there has been a huge change.
I'd also like to put a little blame on the baby boomers - they always seem to think that their changes were the biggest, most significant changes. Maybe 1950-1970s or whatever were extraordinarily different, not that now is abnormal. Like age of first marriage being really young for the boomers/post-war (I'm getting this exact time completely wrong) and so now it seems like we're getting married so old when really we're reverting to a more common, older age.
Look at the current front page of My Parents Were Awesome. Every decade is obviously identifiable, but no one is wearing anything hilariously embarrassing. The hairstyles are pretty much the only thing that would look very dated today.
220 -- KC and the Sunshine Band played at the amusement park for my HS senior all-nighter. I think. Maybe it was Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds. Neither represents the zenith of all creative achievement, so why does it persist?
Tattoos and pubic hair fashion are epoch markers.
224: I saw KC and the Sunshine Band playing a university party in the U.K. in 1992 or so.
One thing the guy mentions is that early TV shows didn't do remakes. No kidding, I say. I think that contemporary culture has more to mine from past trends than they did in the 1970s, and we're better at mining good stuff that worked and ignoring the neon pants, just because we have more from which to choose. I'm skeptical that it maps onto some broader cultural narrative: there's only so many times you can make the tops tight and the bottoms loose and reverse it before you start to learn from what worked and what didn't.
Eew eew eew! I do not need to see anyone, my parents or otherwise, wearing these t-shirts.
228: That may be the very most awesomest one of all.
|?
Nick Rowe ...is part of a big econoblog dustup over a Stiglitz article that says increased agricultural productivity during the twenties caused the Great Depression
You only think this is off topic.
This, and the above, is all about the organic composition of capital at the edge of crisis. Objectified mental labour becomes so productive as to increase unemployment, but capital cannot create value. Only labour. So on the edge of crisis you have an excess of capital and a dearth or real value in commodities.
That is what the Vanity Fair is noticing, and since it has been 80 years since the last economic cataclysm, the lack of value looks new.
Deflation will fix it.
|>
229: The Sunshine band probably can't even afford Carrboro.
Every decade is obviously identifiable, but no one is wearing anything hilariously embarrassing
Well, yeah, it's not called "My Parents Were Hideously Embarrassing, Though They Wouldn't Have Been Thought So At The Time".
222.1 -- I'm going to the store to buy stuff that looks the same, to me, as what I wore 20 years ago, and have been wearing ever since then. I accept completely your statement that it's not actually the same, and if I was perceptive enough to notice, I'd see that you are right. Granted. The thing is, I wasn't doing the same thing 20 years ago, and it would have been inconceivable to have thought doing so would be a good idea. And an ordinary store wouldn't even have the stuff that would allow me to try to duplicate a look.
One thing the guy mentions is that early TV shows didn't do remakes.
Early tv shows were direct knockoffs of radio programs.
Honeymooners, December Bride
Unless you have a different understanding of "early"
No, I'm asserting that you tend towards stable fashions, CC, and that those would have been available to you at every point since 1920.
The thing is, I wasn't doing the same thing 20 years ago, and it would have been inconceivable to have thought doing so would be a good idea. And an ordinary store wouldn't even have the stuff that would allow me to try to duplicate a look.
Actually I have no idea what this means.
228: Those are particularly amazing.
On the remakes question, all the big Disney staple movies from the 50s on were well-known children's stories. Movies started remaking each other when they were still black and white.
228: Poor Reno. It's all just a chore to him.
228+238: They are almost -- almost! -- terrible enough to elevate the awfulness of coordinated couples clothing into something sublime. But I'm stuck in the 'eew'.
Has anybody bothered to move this from music and clothes to say movies and novels?
The capital to produce new movies (budgets, 3d, CGI) has vastly increased and improved, but the value (which is not sales or profit, but that which can reproduce or supersede) of new product we get Avengers, Mission Impossible, and Marvel Nostalgia #18.
236, 237 -- I don't think fashions were stable enough in the late 70s that I could go to a store in 1990 and expect to come out looking the same (even to an unskilled eye), without looking ridiculous. T-shirts and 501s, sure. White denim overalls, striped painter pants, not so much.
But the point isn't the fashioned has changed. Clearly it has. In minor incremental ways for mainstream non-youth clothing, and in fairly major rapid ways for high-fashion and youth/street clothing.* But I don't think the idea that this particular period is a fairly static one vis a vis mainstream adult fashion is a crazy one.
* my wife works in fashion retail; a couple of times a year she brings home a carefully researched expensively produced 'book' from her company detailing all the trends of the previous few months, expected trends over the next few months, and so on. On a personal level, I'm not entirely unaware that fashions change.
ttaM, I'm with you on the swing music; that's what I've got on in the house most evenings.
Heebie, I swear I committed to lots of color in my house. My theory was that if there was no bland contrast, no particular color would be overwhelming. So I could use them all! I'm still super pleased with it. People come in and say nice things, and often say that I must come help them pick colors for their house. But they never follow through.
That should read 'isn't that fashion hasn't changed'.
Somewhere in the archives, there is an Achilles Heel for me on this whole argument, but I'm not going to go bother finding it.
OK, 239 gets to something I know about, and if the idea is that there's some constant level of remakes, the point is just wrong. It's absolutely true that Hollywood remade things (including past films) from pretty much as soon as there were things to remake. But that misses the bigger picture completely. It's just a much more significant part of the budgeting, now, such that almost every tentpole picture has to be either a remake of an older film or a revival of some preexisting pop culture brand, particularly comics. And it's not just borrowing source material, which Hollywood has done; it's deliberately playing to a sense of revival or pop culture mining.* The notion that there's something new in the culture of remakes that wasn't there in, say, 1970 (when, remember, there were either 40 or 65 years of films to remake, depending on how you count) just seems totally incontrovertible to me.
*There are economic reasons for this unrelated to demand, but it's also a response to shift in consumer demand.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure the two posts are easily resolved. This one is definitely right.
244.last: After use, they store the books for five years and then ship them to the Pittsburgh stores.
I'm not going to argue recycled move content with Halford. You win.
My theory was that if there was no bland contrast, no particular color would be overwhelming. So I could use them all!
I'm on board with this! I'm even on board with white walls. I think that can be beautiful. Just as long as there's bold color throughout the room.
I'm pretty sure I'm never on board with that tan-with-gray-undertones paint color that is supposed to be what you should coat your walls before you sell or rent anything. (On the other hand tan-with-caramel-undertones, like a camel color, can look lovely.)
...but it's also a response to shift in consumer demand.
Is it possible that the shift in consumer demand was caused by everything being a remake. Aside from kiddie movies, I don't even bother to go anymore. There's nothing I want to see if I have to pay more than $1.28 for it.
You will have to get old to understand the horror I feel at the Avengers It's a nightmare.
Comic book cultural production.
Full employment economies create Value. The early 40s and 60s created comic book material that could be reproduced or superseded in later eras.
Low employment economies, to the extent they create, create kitsch and destroy Value. Capital, including social capital, must be destroyed to start a new cycle.
Pics or it didn't happen. Solve the question by digging out appropriate Sears catalogs and comparing them fairly or you're just masturgazing.
Our house has blue and gold and purple and green and melon and caramel and teal walls. It works, and I sometimes think we were attracted to it because it was one of the few houses that we saw that wasn't studious inoffensively grayish-tan, with the same tan-white-brown carpeting, with the same cheaply redone kitchen in inoffensive stone colors.
I am overreacting to a decade of being in cheap housing with that soul-sucking eggshell offwhite. Paint is fun.
Take a handful of students from any decade since 1920, and about half of them will look surprisingly modern, and about half of them will look very specific to their time-period. Fashion has some eternal styles which will look right at home in any decade - plaid flannel, slouchy v-neck sweater, certain washes and cuts of jeans - and other styles which seem horrendously ludicrous 5 years later....Plenty of people have items from when they were 20, unless they no longer fit. But you don't necessarily have the truly goofy shit, or maybe you didn't go for the truly goofy shit at the time.
I must acknowledge that my claim about taking 10 random individuals from my college class does not contradict heebie's point here, because my college class was disproportionately conformist, and disproportionately northeastern preppy -- in other words, drawn from the half of the population that looks basically the same from age to age.
That said, you could not have taken 10 at random from the class of '72 and had them blend in in 1992, nor, mutatis mutandis, '62 and '82. (Before that, I'm not sure.) So I'm standing by my defense of the proposition that there is something distinctively static about the last 20 years.
I shouldn't argue with Halford either, but Mutiny on the Bounty was made in the 30s, 50s, and 80s, and a whole lot of movies from the past seem to me to have been recognizable brands. Ok, there's the period from Easy Rider to Heavens Gate where things might have been a little different, but I'm not sure the big studio era was that big on risk-taking.
Watched Gosford Park last night, and the American director going on about his next Charlie Chan picture didn't seem out of place, although Altman isn't a disinterested observer.
Anyway, if people want to increase box office earnings, they should try to suck less.
You will have to get old to understand the horror I feel at the Avengers It's a nightmare.
Comic book cultural production.
And your point is? Of course The Avengers was comic book cultural production: Rigg is on record as saying they often didn't know which episode a scene they were filming was part of.
You have a problem with comic books?
My dad has managed to wear exactly the same blue-ish Pendleton plaid shirts for the past fifty years. The only pants variation I've seen in the entire family photo album is that one picture in the 1970s where he was wearing corduroys with a slight flare--otherwise it's jeans with almost no variability.
Jackets are where the years really matter. Ski jackets, blazers, even goretex anoraks will give away the decade every time.
Did anyone link to this yet? It's an annual gallery of summer interns. The 1992 iteration has about 3-4 people who would look somewhat out of place if you saw them at the mall today, but otherwise they all look completely contemporary.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lpiintern/alumni/2009.shtml
Only goes back to '77 unfortunately, and yeah, you can tell it's the '70s, man.
The idea that movies have to be part of an established brand is sad, and a real difference. People used to go see movies so much more often that they were more willing to take a chance on something. (Yes, a massive generalization.)
164, 175: Very kewl. I noticed that the Computer Dazzle folks are migrating from Java to C++. That seems backward to me. I wonder why they are doing it.
I think Sean Penn was an internet in 1977.
263: I'm hoping that the trend towards streaming-content-on-demand will really open up the variety of available films. I'm hoping that the demand for reasonable, cheap content goes way up.
Re: cars over time, one thing I noticed during the real estate bubble was that you hardly ever saw any junkers on the road. Now, they're all back. I don't know what happened. Apparently when people's mortgages are under water, they go out and hit their car with a baseball bat, take off the hubcaps and spray a bunch of primer on it.
People haven't been inviting you to their junker parties?
People just stopped buying cars. Here's a graph.
260:I meant the Marvel series, soon to be a MMP, not the television series.
My point was the horror of seeing my youth endlessly paraded before. I want new exciting stuff, so I don't have to go back to the 30s or overseas to get the thrill of discovery.
I exaggerate of course.
I was watching a Seinfeld episode last night and it's true that - especially Jerry - looked uncontemporary in a way that was hard to place.
I think it's because he wore light-colored jeans and tucked in his shirts.
I really noticed cars getting shitty after the giant snowstorms of February 2010. I stopped driving for over a week because I didn't have to drive and because if somebody crashed into the bus, I didn't have to worry about fixing it. It seems that many people stopped worrying about costmetic damage after that.
262:I got that goddamn red + white striped shirt dead center of the 2009 picture. I bought it 15 years ago. I'm thinner, and you would have to shoot me to get the top collar button buttoned.
It's an orange shirt. You can see the UT Longhorn on it.
The 1992 iteration has about 3-4 people who would look somewhat out of place if you saw them at the mall today, but otherwise they all look completely contemporary.
I just don't agree with this at all.
I concur with 277. The people in the picture in 262 look both incredibly dated and pretty damn nerdy even for the time.
Going through them starting with the most recent, the 2006 photo was the first one that I would definitely identify as non-contemporary if I weren't given dates. 2001 is the first one where the clothes strike me as extremely dated, though that may be because the people in '02 and '03 aren't standing up, so you can't see the cuts of their pants.
I've thrown a few old pictures into the pool, just for kicks. I'll take them out again in a bit.
re: 279
The clothes could be nerdy from any recent-ish period. I still see people at my place of work dressed in a way that would entirely fit with the 90s images. The haircuts definitely date people, though. It doesn't help, though, that they look out of place even for the time. I remember early to mid 90s fashion reasonably well, and I'm pretty sure what I wore [after I'd stopped dressing like Noel Fielding's early 90s alter-ego] would have looked quite different.
Dark jeans, certainly. Not pale or washed. Although less skinny in the lower leg than would be fashionable [even now that the skinny jean isn't quite as de rigeur].
I didn't say nerdy, though: with the exception of maybe one or two people in each photo, they mostly don't strike me as nerdy. Could it be that what other people are calling 'nerdy' I'm calling 'dated'?
The clothes and haircuts don't look appropriate to me for the early to mid 90s, which is when I was an undergraduate, and I have quite a good memory for my flatmates/friends clothes and hair. Those friends would probably have been on the more fashionable side of the clothes/hair curve, but not absolutely bleeding edge hipster types.
For at least some of those pictures, I think so. I didn't look at all of them, but clicked on one from the 80s, and while they don't look good, the jeans and t-shirts look like something I might see on someone badly dressed today.
284: I think the idea that somebody wearing clothes that would have looked fine in a different era look nerdy and unfashionable today argues fairly strongly that things are changing.
See, I thought that the original article was so obviously true as to be banal. Fashion changed slower because other things are changed much faster. Technologically, my daughter's world is much different than the my world as a child, and that wouldn't have been true in 1992.
You can run the argument in reverse for the 60s and 70s. Back then, you had a general increase in affluence, but not a technological revolution that affected day-to-day lives. Against a more steady backdrop, people felt more free to experiment with fashion.
285: No, no. ttaM is saying that he remembers that era, and was moderately glamorous at the time (no arguments, we've seen pictures), and knows what well-dressed people at the time looked like. And he looks at those pictures, and says, "Even in 1995, when the picture was taken, those guys looked like dorks. That doesn't look dated, it's a picture of people who didn't know how to dress back then."
Ignore 287 -- I got which comment 285 was responding to completely wrong. Possibly I should actually be working here.
re: 287
Exactly. Except I wasn't really well-dressed then -- you've seen photos of glam rock late 80s me. But I was sort of solidly in-fashion at the time. Hip fashionable people [of the indie/studenty variety, rather than really glam/clubbing types] wouldn't have completely scorned me and my clothes, but they've be under no illusions that I was one of them.
But yeah, mid 90s [once the early 90s stopped looking '80s'] were dark boot cut jeans, say, on women, rather than the sort of loose, washed or faded jeans on the mid 90s photos from the link above. Tops were tight, not loose [as per heebie in the OP].* Hair different, too. Although I find it hard to explain how, exactly. Also, as per heebie in the OP, my circa 96 girlfriend wore things like short A-line corduroy skirts, vintage trainers, etc. You already had the cool trainer thing, partly as a sort of conscious imitation of 80s hip-hop, and a sort of revival of a mod/soul-boy sort of aesthetic. Friends were wearing buying things like leather sports coats at vintage shops, and so on. I certainly know what I was buying around that time, and it was what you'd think of as fairly standard GAP type stuff. Dark 'vintage'-ish denim, plain dark or white crew-neck t-shirts, classic trainers. The cut of the jeans would def. look dated, but not as dated as the photos. FWIW, it's this sort of thing that helps me sort of buy some qualified version of the claim heebie was arguing against in the OP. Someone dressed like a moderately fashionable student circa 1996 might be wearing jeans of a slightly odd cut [for today] but other than that, I don't think the changes are that drastic.
* my friend Stu was vocal at the time that the tight v-neck long-sleeve top of circa 1992 onwards was one of the great boons of his life.
225: Staiman, who administers between five and 10 Brazilian waxes per week (and even more in the summertime and just before Halloween), also notes that her clientele is overwhelmingly white and Asian.
Emphasis mine. I'm not surprised about the Halloween thing, exactly, but I'm ... well, half-surprised.
"I'm going as a naked eleven-year old."
If you find a eunuch to take, you could go as one of those "Love Is..." couples from the funny papers.
I haven't really read the whole thread, so please excuse if I'm repeating, but while I think on the one hand I agree with Heebie, on the other hand, I think that there has been a distinct change in the way people dress. I think there is distinctly less of a difference between 'youth' and 'adult' clothing; I see plenty of 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds dressed fundamentally the same. (This is influenced by a horrible old article I read from 2006 or so about the rise of the Grup recently, but I do think they were hitting on something real - there is a less of a need to dress like a 'grown-up' in this day and age.) And in many cases, that 40-year-old isn't dressed all that differently than his/her 25-year-old self (with the caveat that Blume above is right that styles, etc. have most definitely changed, even if the uniform is jeans, vintage sneakers and a tight tee).
I dress about the same as I did at twenty five but much nicer than I did at twenty. Plus, I'm now starting to wear jackets to work just because I feel old enough that I should. I don't wear one everyday, just when the weather makes it comfortable
Cherry-picking the thread:
188:The look I never expected to see revived was towering heels on women for daytime. Maybe this is because I grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by hippies, but I really thought that inevitable human progress would have us all wearing nice Danskos or Vibrams or whatever in the future. Instead, half the young women on the subway are wearing shit like this.
I saw a couple of women staggering across the street to a cafe wearing those this morning; I just thought they had bad taste or something, didn't realize it was a newish thing. I predict it won't last long.
The ass-cradling tights as pants thing seems to be lasting past the start of cold weather.
. I certainly know what I was buying around that time, and it was what you'd think of as fairly standard GAP type stuff. Dark 'vintage'-ish denim, plain dark or white crew-neck t-shirts, classic trainers. The cut of the jeans would def. look dated, but not as dated as the photos. FWIW, it's this sort of thing that helps me sort of buy some qualified version of the claim heebie was arguing against in the OP. Someone dressed like a moderately fashionable student circa 1996 might be wearing jeans of a slightly odd cut [for today] but other than that, I don't think the changes are that drastic.
Yes, but. Compare t-shirt and jeans for the last 60(?) years, and there will be a ton of continuity. Someone in a t-shirt in jeans from 1955, 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005 will all look right at home in the surrounding decades. There might have been fewer people who dressed every day in a t-shirt and jeans in 1955, but it would compare favorably with 1945 and 1965.
re: 297
I think we are talking slightly at cross purposes. I had in mind that mid-90s jeans, t-shirt, shoes, plus accessories, etc look closer to 2011 equivalents than say, mid-90s things would to the equivalent 20 years before, or even 10 years before. Although I suppose I do partly say that [undermining myself now] because I'm too old to have gone down the super-skinny jeans and big massive low-cut v-neck on men route, a year or so back.
Basically I agree with you re: the accumulation of small differences, but still think mainstream adult clothing [i.e. not high fashion or 'street' stuff] has been fairly static over the past decade or decade and a half compared to the preceding decade or two.
Most people looked pretty ordinary in the 70s and 80s. Or at least more people than we remember.
I've thrown a few old pictures into the pool, just for kicks. I'll take them out again in a bit.
And in every one of those (great, awesome) photos of Carpie, the clothes would not look out of place today. At all.
I can remember the 80s very clearly. Nobody dressed like the movies, but I was in a small farm town. Members Only jackets were real and common. Looking like Adam Ant, not so much.
One of the problems with doing fairly-recent-period TV and movies is that you can usually come up with pristine vintage cars, but you can't find the clunkers, junkers, beaters and bangers: they've all gone to the scrapyard.
One of the problems with doing fairly-recent-period TV and movies is that you can usually come up with pristine vintage cars, but you can't find the clunkers, junkers, beaters and bangers: they've all gone to the scrapyard.
Plenty of the clunkers just got parked behind the hill and abandoned. Probably those can't be fixed. I think we've all experienced the sheer joy of firing a shotgun into a junked car.
I think we've all experienced the sheer joy of firing a shotgun into a junked car.
Totally. It's the main reason we should shoot space junk out of the sky (or into littler bits) with space lasers.
you hardly ever saw any junkers on the road.
I had a bit of this discussion driving through NE Ohio with one of my kids recently when we saw a few real rusty junkers over a short distance. However, the percentage of them on the road (or parked in the Stormcrow driveway) is still a mere fraction of what it was during my NE Ohio youth. A rather significant visual change beyond the change in car styles over my lifetime (and not nearly as noticeable outside of the Rust Belt).
I drive a 1995, which may explain my fondness for the bus.
I couldn't care about Elaine Benes or Loni Anderson or Mary Tyler Moore or whoever from Gilligan's Island, but you are soooo wrong about the brunette with glasses from WKRP (Bailey, wasn't it?). Women often say that men are superficial but at least we think beyond what a woman is wearing.
In about fifteen years, all the boys who had their latency period ended before it stated by Nina are going to hit the dating scene. Women with pajamas and straight, dark hair will rule the scene.
The before-bedtime yoga was just too much.
131
I think it would be stronger comparing television show to television show ...
I briefly compared Homicide to The Rockford Files here . It seemed to me that cars changed more from The Rockford Files period (1974-1980) to the Homicide period (1993-1999) than from the Homicide period to today. So I am sympathetic to the view that change in car designs (in terms of external visual appearance) has slowed down.
300 -- The picture of my wife, taken on our wedding day, is not a 2010s look. I wouldn't wear a red and white checked shirt now, although that one was a particular cotton fabric that was wonderfully soft, and if I had a time machine, I'd got get a couple more of them.
I was hoping to find something with white denim overalls and a Cal blue and gold rugby shirt. No one took that picture, apparently.
She does the Sprout PBS evening show.
Oh, right I think I remember you commenting on the virtues of the Wiggles. From wiki I see that she replaced a former host mired in scandal over appearing in Technical Virgin videos (which were sometimes amusing).
Or just watch Sprout. Thomas the Tank Engine teaches so much.
I drive a 1995, which may explain my fondness for the bus.
Heh. We're sporting a '96 Corolla and a '98 Outback, the "nice" car. My patrol vehicle feels like a luxury ride in comparison ('06 Impala).
whoever from Gilligan's Island
Dawn Wells. Dammit. Great human being.
the brunette with glasses from WKRP (Bailey, wasn't it?). Women often say that men are superficial but at least we think beyond what a woman is wearing.
Damn, can't do the name without lookup
But "look beyond" like hell. Glasses are hott.
(Jan Smithers)
Changes in outline in the 19th c., for womens' clothes in England and France especially, and mostly urban (or, depending on who you read, merely 20 years ahead of the provinces).
heebie and I are right because we're the only ones who are high.
The changes look so big because you're both on acid. Two glasses of Kool-Aid look unbearably different in that state. The rest of us are facing a reality where everyone has been wearing Mao jackets for 30 years.
OMG I see the mao jackets...but now my face is melting!
You can run the argument in reverse for the 60s and 70s. Back then, you had a general increase in affluence, but not a technological revolution that affected day-to-day lives. Against a more steady backdrop, people felt more free to experiment with fashion.
Oh, hell no once again. You're arguing the 60s and 70s weren't a time of a technological revolution? Television went from a luxury item to a mass market. (In the UK at least.) Colour TV. Video recording. Cheap fast international air travel. Satellites! Golf on the moon! Hovercraft! Computer games! Cassette tapes!
Yes, everything in human history everywhere around the world has changed at the same steady rate since the Paleolithic.
1990s look staple you'd look strange in now: army surplus combats (or worse, trousers designed to look like them. I think Maharishi are still going but I can't imagine who buys. old ravers who remember the heyday, presumably..
Literally everyone who cared at all about clothes did that one, and then the high street invented "cargos" that stuck a couple of huge patch pockets on a set of stock dad chinos, and all the people who didn't care at all wore those, thus killing the whole idea.
see also: statementy outdoors kit, brightly coloured Berghaus or Helly Hansen jackets, Timberland between-a-trainer-and-a-hiking-boot, tight t-shirt with something "ironic". and you're good to go.
Now it would only make sense if you were halfway up a mountain, or working on a construction site.
Also, the "only 2000 people in the 60s" meme is crap. My m\um in Ba\sildon (and then Manchester) had a Vidal Sassoon bob, a miniskirt, a number of mod boyfriends on Lambrettas and a hell of a good time, by her account. killer quote: "it was a g\reat de\cade to have long legs". even if she managed to fall a\sleep in a P\ink F\loyd gig.
hmm, this is going to need to some thorough g\ooglep\roofing...
Too late, son. Don't think you're told old to be sent to your room without supper.
327. A few mods and some tribal gear do not a cultural revolution make. Otherwise you're going to have to give the same credit to the Teds, who were quintessentially 50s.
if I had a time machine, I'd go get a couple more of them.
After killing Hitler, of course.
The picture of my wife, taken on our wedding day, is not a 2010s look. I wouldn't wear a red and white checked shirt now, although that one was a particular cotton fabric that was wonderfully soft, and if I had a time machine, I'd got get a couple more of them.
You mean the photo where she's in the peach pants and poncho? I honestly would not bat an eye if I saw someone wearing that. I'd assume they were a bit of a hippie, though.
Also, that red and white checked shirt is great, and Jammies would easily wear it. Really, more timeless than not.
The before-bedtime yoga was just too much.
Nina gives me a special feeling.
326 is an almost-perfect description of the amazingly rigid dress code that is Contractor Chic. Desert boots, khaki Carhartts or 5.11s, black North Face fleece top over tight t-shirt with some sort of slogan, Oakleys, baseball cap with velcro panel. Available in a FOB near you now.
I would have liked to contribute to this thread, but since Cala already nailed me in 144.1, my contribution would have been superfluous. I literally still own t-shirts and overshirts from 20 (sometimes more!) years ago. I admitted to myself that, sadly, I will never again fit in the 31 waist Levi's, so those are now gone (replaced with 33s).
But I have to say this (and it was probably said in the subsequent 200 comments): Team H-G seems to be leaning heavily on, "if you look closely, you can detect differences between 1992 and 2012" as being equivalent to "a dress or suit from 1972 would have looked like a costume in 1992". And it's not just because '72 was a unique outlier. Go from '82 to '02, and you're in a costume as well.
and then the high street invented "cargos" that stuck a couple of huge patch pockets on a set of stock dad chinos, and all the people who didn't care at all wore those, thus killing the whole idea.
FWIW, I got a pair of cargo pants of that description in a mall in suburban Miami in 1985. Not sure where the cause and effect were, just pointing out a glitch in your timeline.
Actually, those cargos are part of why I buy Andersen's thesis: when they wore out, I was heartbroken, because I couldn't replace them: by '89, nobody sold them except Army/Navy stores, where they were made out of nylon or some shit. Then cargos came back in the mid-90s, and I bought them whenever I got the chance, so I'd have a stash for when they next went away.
Hasn't happened yet. There have been more and less fashionable cuts/styles (for awhile, they had stupid numbers of pockets), but the "a couple of huge patch pockets on a set of stock dad chinos" has been sold continuously at Macy's for ~16 years now, after being a niche item, at best, prior to that.
re: 327
Yeah. Photos of my mum from the late 60s have her with long poker straight hair [like late 60s Cher] and classic Quant style mini-dresses. And she was just a suburban teenager in the Staines area, hardly some metropolitan hipster type. My Dad was in the army in the late 60s, but early 70s, he had the full array of huge triangular hippy hair, bell-bottoms, platform heeled boots, etc. And that was on a central Scottish council estate.
I also don't buy the 'the 60/70s didn't happen for most people' thing. Perhaps some of the more outre stuff didn't travel well outside of London, but that seems about it.
I also don't buy the 'the 60/70s didn't happen for most people' thing.
Depends on whether you mean fashion or tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. I assume the latter was a relatively rare experience (except in the sense of kids finding their way to lost weekends or whatever - not a new lifestyle, just falling in with some people on acid and such), but the fashion was def. widespread. My mom was newlywed and pregnant (and years out of college) during the summer of love, but by god she had bell bottoms and maxi dresses
I bought them whenever I got the chance, so I'd have a stash for when they next went away.
In the 90s, I had a boss who always wore suits with 1970's cuts on the jackets and skirts. I just assumed she had a bunch of old clothes that she kept very well. Or, because the fabrics didn't seem to be 1970's colors, that she found a store that sold them. It turned out she was sewing them herself.
A workmate of mine always worse 70s suits to work as a deliberate protest. He didn't see why he had to wear a suit [we were techies who worked in a call centre], so he used to buy deliberately dated looking suits in odd browns from charity shops or vintage places. It had the advantage that he actually looked quite cool in a Jarvis Cocker sort of way (he had and has good taste), and it subtly pissed off our boss.
so what IS a safe color/cut of jeans if you're teaching undergraduates for the first time in a while and want to look neither hip-curious nor actively ludicrous? is dark wash boot cut fairly tight but this side of skinny still safe? if I have no facial hair of any kind, then do I get to have slightly more hipsterish jeans? is it possible to avoid sending all the many kinds of signals I want to avoid sending?
hip-curious
Why is this objectionable? I started wearing a small goatee about a year ago. Wasn't sure if it would look obnoxious, but people seem to like it.
dated looking suits in odd browns
This was another odd (and conveeeeeenient) elision from the above discussion of how, supposedly, men's suits in the '70s were really mostly just like suits from today. When was the last time you saw a brown (real, chocolate brown, not some ultra-dark brown that's effectively an earthy shade of gray) suit worn by a normal businessman? Yet, they were completely normal in the 70s - it was much more common for a businessman to won one than not to. Since double breasted faded at the end of the 80s, I can't think of any comparably common, fundamental aspect of men's suits that's changed like color norms did (there was the 3 to 4 to 3 button thing, but I'm not sure 4 button jackets were ever typical, as opposed to broadly stylish).
I wholly endorse LB's formula that, if you tried, you could find something from a typical 70s closet that was wearable (in an anonymous way, not retro) in the 90s, whereas a typical 90s closet is full of garments that are wearable, if not fashionable, today.
342--Al Gore
341. No, man, you look good! I just mean it's not what I'm going for in this context.....
342.1: I googled and couldn't find a brown suit for sale. I'm not exactly sad to see them gone, but I'd never noticed before.
re: 344
I see them around very occasionally. But they tend to be a very dark chocolate brown, or a sort of neutral brownish mid-grey, rather than something 70s.
I own a brown suit. And nothing chocolately, either. Proudly brown. But I don't wear it much.
I don't see how you can say fashion hasn't changed when Malibu Stacy has a new hat.
I lost my last pairs of the sunglasses shown in those pics just last year, and my wife won't let me buy a new pair. Too old fashioned. Still torn about whether this is a hill to die on.
I have a chocolate-brown linen suit, purchased in Rome, that I (a) love inappropriately and (b) wear to the office in the summer. I also have two brown wool pinstripe suits.
Still torn about whether this is a hill to die on.
You'll die on it when you drive over the ridge straight into the setting/rising sun and there's a fool in something too big coming the other way. Get some sunglasses.
318: Ours are a '96 XJ6 and a '93 Cavalier. Bits actually fall off the Jag and the Chevy has a bad Texas tan (and we're not in Texas).
I've now had three Jags: '76, '84 and the present '96. Since it now has over 150K miles on it, I'm looking at an '04 XJ8 to replace it. There's not that much difference in appearance across the four. Nor much difference in the way they drove/drive. Internally, the electrics in the older ones were shit (Lucas, Prince of Darkness) and the newer ones were built after Ford introduced Jaguar to some decent parts suppliers. And the later the model, the more gadgets. But that fits Knecht Ruprecht's OP point.
This was another odd (and conveeeeeenient) elision from the above discussion of how, supposedly, men's suits in the '70s were really mostly just like suits from today. When was the last time you saw a brown (real, chocolate brown, not some ultra-dark brown that's effectively an earthy shade of gray) suit worn by a normal businessman? Yet, they were completely normal in the 70s - it was much more common for a businessman to won one than not to. Since double breasted faded at the end of the 80s, I can't think of any comparably common, fundamental aspect of men's suits that's changed like color norms did (there was the 3 to 4 to 3 button thing, but I'm not sure 4 button jackets were ever typical, as opposed to broadly stylish).
This is ten kinds of silly. Brown suits wouldn't have looked that crazy in the 60s or the 80s. The claim isn't that the 70s would look hunky-dory today; the claim is that the 90s and 00s blend right together.
Furthermore! If you took a woman in today's drapy dresses, or ruched sides, or cowl neck tunic with jeggings, with the side-swept bangs and current hair, and plopped her in 1996, she would look very weird to other people there. Really. She'd get a lot of weird looks.
If anyone is willing to pay for a subscription to the full archives of Vogue magazine, we could settle this question once and for all. WITH SCIENCE. Every issue dating back to 1892. The archive is "searchable by decade, brand, designer, and photographer; you can also sort results by articles, images, covers, or ads." Only $1,575 per year.
I don't think so. Some men would explain that photos of gals in jeans and white blouses are indistinguishable, maybe the hair or lighting looks kind of different. The ladies would patiently and kindly explain the error of our ways, full of hope for a world that can be changed if not perfected.
But if you made it quantifiable, you could test it statistically to see if the variance in the last 20 years has decreased compared to similar time intervals in prior periods.
330: if I had a time machine, I'd go get a couple more of them.
After killing Hitler, of course.
Mission Accomplished! Got him right as he was going into the bunker with Eva.
358: Yes, but what were they wearing?
||
Continuing my off-topic conversation with LB.
170: Often the right answer, actually, even in a non-hellish working relationship. But when you're being pressed for "No, really, what was the reasoning behind putting this argument in?" sometimes there's nothing for it but "I was only following orders."
Yes, certainly. However, in this particular case (not the worst I've encountered, but almost) the closest you (or at least *I*) can safely come is to say, "We thought [whatever BS reason] at the time", and if it's a good day they'll allow that they were in fact part of the "we". I shouldn't whine, am quite aware of my personal Fasutian bargain that puts the [hypothetical] stand-mixer on the counter, but sometimes I still do.
I will also say that I do stand somewhat in awe of those who can channel the massive energy of their neuroses and ego defense mechanisms into professional advancement behaviors.
|>
If you took a woman in today's drapy dresses, or ruched sides, or cowl neck tunic with jeggings, with the side-swept bangs and current hair, and plopped her in 1996, she would look very weird to other people there. Really. She'd get a lot of weird looks.
It seems fairly unarguable that women's fashion changes a lot more, and a lot more rapidly, than men. I have always assumed that this is because men run the fashion industry.
"...than men's fashion", I should have said.
Than men too, though.
||
The Cambodia mentions in the other thread reminds me that it was perhaps been not wise for me to describe the recent change in the of the boss's boss in 361 from "acting" to permanent as "Year Zero with X".
|>
This thread is still driving me nuts, because I'm so wildly correct, and I keep browsing on youtube and finding all kinds of great ways to illustrate my point.
But I know if I posted these, I'd get responses where people don't really pay attention to my point, and coast on stereotypes about the decades, and I'll get all worked up again. Really, the OP is sound, and I just have to trust that you all will realize my rightness ten years from now.
See 355. For only $1,575, you could settle this.
366: alternatively, see 355-Kobe. Probably cheaper.
Issues of Vogue, while fun to flip through, unfortunately would convince no one because all high end fashion looks bizarre, always, and none of us would be very good at picking out the decade that any of it occurred, because it would all be so off the wall.
Somebody just posted a picture of me from 2000 on facebook. It definitely looks dated, in terms of the clothes we're wearing and the hair and so on.
365: This thread is still driving me nuts, because I'm so wildly correct [3:] I really, really like thinking about fashion.
re: 370
There is truth there.
I could probably get super-nerdy about changes in particular musical genres I like, or cameras, or whatever. People who find something interesting notice more.
The claim isn't that the 70s would look hunky-dory today; the claim is that the 90s and 00s blend right together.
Perhaps this is why you're being so persistently wrong: you actually don't understand what the claim is. LB summarized it well in 214, but I guess that didn't take, so I'll try again, using MATH:
1952-1932=X±10%
1972-1952=X±10%
1992-1972=X±10%
2012-1992=X-50%
That's the actual claim. Not that 2012-1992=0. That would be a stupid claim, and one unlikely to be made by an extremely trend-conscious New Yorker aged 52 years, who makes a living in cultural criticism. Fortunately, we have no examples of such a claim being made, so we can stick with the claim at hand: 2012 looks a lot more like 1992 than any/most prior 20 year pairings (since the 1800s; the article makes no claims for the pre-Edwardian era). The fact that clothes sold in Gap in 2000 are not, literally, identical to clothes sold at Gap right now is irrelevant.
I also think it's hilarious that you were born in 1978, yet keep insisting that a man who was an adult at the beginning of the '70s (CC, obvs) is relying on nothing but media-created images of the 1970s to generate his understanding of the decade.
Part of what's crazy is that there are actual, literally measurable metrics. Ties. I have, in my closet, 3 ties bought at fairly high-end, reputable stores in 1990, 2001, and 2010. They are 3.25" (tail end of the 80s), 3.75", and 3.75" wide. Incidentally, I have one that was given to me ca. 1995, and it was 3.625" wide - already most of the way to the post-Clinton tie width.
Now go back farther, and look at ties from 1980, 1970, 1960, and 1950. You will see far, far more variation. I know; I've tried to borrow ties from my dad.
And again, the point isn't that, since (high-end, reputable) ties didn't change width in the last 10 years, therefore 2000==2011. It's that you see far more variation across comparable periods in the pre-1992 epoch.
353: Brown suits wouldn't have looked that crazy in the 60s or the 80s.
Not in the 80s, because there were plenty of guys in lower-middle management, or who taught HS geometry, who were still wearing the suits they had bought most recently, in 1974.
I also think it's hilarious that you were born in 1978, yet keep insisting that a man who was an adult at the beginning of the '70s (CC, obvs) is relying on nothing but media-created images of the 1970s to generate his understanding of the decade.
You know, CC was living in real, live houses for over a decade before you were born.
Pretty much throughout this thread, when people have gone back and looked at stock photos from the decades of actual people where daily clothes, they've sided with me.
374 is precisely my point. Exactly. There are still plenty of people wearing their 90s clothes, and so they don't look all that strange. Someone might even be wearing a high end tie from 1995.
Whereas if they'd tried to borrow their dad's tie, they might find that it had a shelf life which was useful for a decade or so, and then expired. Depending on the trendiness of the tie.
Here are some examples I've compiled over the past few days:
1. R&B boy bands from the years, riffing on New Edition in the 1980s. If you go watch Cool It Now, you might find that it looks very similar to looks you might see in the 1990s.
2. TV themes, riffing on Magnum PI. You might notice that Magnum PI looks remarkably similar to the 70s in many ways, and the 90s in other ways.
3. TV themes, riffing on 90210. Sometimes the crew look fucking nuts, other times surprisingly normal. Compare with the theme of The Monkees TV Show, and you get about the same ratio.
Overall: in our collective memories, we've suppressed the many ways that the 80s are very similar to the 70s, and to the 90s. It's almost like a continuous timeline. Gee.
And yes, the 70s wins on some wacked out measures. Sure, the 70s were uniquely bizarre. See comment 19.
377 has me completely confused, as did previous of Heebie's comments on this: I thought you were arguing that changes from the 1990s through the 2010s were just as extensive as those from previous 20-year spans, but 377 and some previous comments seem to argue for the opposite.
I get the part of the argument according to which we're all relying on stereotypes at this point.
I thought you were arguing that changes from the 1990s through the 2010s were just as extensive as those from previous 20-year spans,
I'm arguing that we exaggerate the differences between the 60s, 70s, and 80s, because we're remembering the goofy extremes, and that we minimize the differences between the 90s and today, because we're very terrible at looking objectively at current fashion and seeing anything but the epitome of normal.
I would assert that every decade is sortorially equidistant from the decades surrounding it, and that every period has some uniquely bizarre traits.
Uniquely bizarre from the 90s: watching young men sag their pants, below all semblance of hips. Having to walk with a strange bowlegged walk just to keep the things up, or hold them with one hand. This blew away the older generation. They could not believe anyone would possibly wear something like that. Uniquely bizarre from the 70s: crazy fucking plaid suits.
But! Both trends don't look that nuts ten years later, because there are plenty of people who are slow to abandon fashion. Ten years from now, sagging pants will look completely fucking insane again, whereas right now it just looks dated.
But in the 70s and 80s people were much much more revolted by the fashions of the 60s and 70s. (Don't remember the 60s or earlier, me.)
Everyone's argument falls apart once we agree that we're intensely sensitive to and subjective about current fashion -- yours falls, heebie, because of course you can see differences: that's what fashion trains us to do.
(Well, my argument that we can't know for a hundred years or so remains solid but uninteresting.)
381.last: Ten years from now, sagging pants will look completely fucking insane again, whereas right now it just looks dated.
I don't know about 'dated': depends on which community you hang out in.
Agreed with clew, if I understand her correctly, that focusing just on fashion is problematic. I will say that when I mentioned the post linked in the OP to a friend several days ago -- I'd seen, um, Kevin Drum mention it, I think -- his first response was to agree wholeheartedly and babble with interest about how much music hasn't changed much at all in the last 20 years. I couldn't help but point out that hip-hop (rap) was pretty damn different, and he had to pause after all. The sagging pants come from the same cultural influence. So that's something we can't really bracket.
It's not an entirely yes or no question, but insisting that the rate of cultural change is always constant seems silly.
But in the 70s and 80s people were much much more revolted by the fashions of the 60s and 70s.
This is true. And I find this totally fascinating. By the mid-80s, revolted is exactly the right word, despite the fact that 70s wear was everywhere. I remember women wearing those polyester wide-leg bell bottoms in deep colors like wine and navy blue, and it was considered hideous.
And in the 90s, there was that sense of revulsion at the 80s, definitely. And today, that revulsion is definitely absent.
The thing is, if you asked people today to pick out the ugliest stuff ever, I think they'd gravitate towards Donna Martin's referee-style halter top with the high neck, and some of the stuff TLC was wearing on Ooooh on the TLC Tip. The focus of current revulsion would still lag at about the same time behind.
What's different is that the cliche of the 90s is not the same as the source of revulsion, whereas in the 70s and 80s, the cliched fashions overlapped nearly exactly with the source of revulsion. I have no idea why this is.
but insisting that the rate of cultural change is always constant seems silly.
Insisting that it hasn't changed, when hoards of talented people pour ungodly amounts of energy into creating new, different interesting ways to leave their stamp on any artistic endeavor, is even sillier.
The lagging revulsion in fashion is an uncanny valley phenomenon. (Another old post from the archives! that I'm not going to dig up.) I also think it shows up when you look at your own past: there's a certain valley where reading your own writing sounds unbearably horrid, and then further back in time, you forgive yourself and can enjoy it on its own merits.
there's a certain valley where reading your own writing sounds unbearably horrid
It isn't so much a valley in my case as the region drained by the Mississippi.
387: so cross the mountains, Moby.
||
Slate clearly loved Hitch even more than being contrary. They really oughta have at least one nasty obit.
|>
385: Insisting that it [the rate of cultural change] hasn't changed .. is even sillier.
I think you mean "insisting that it has changed"?
Most of your references, certainly in 384, have been to the 70s to today, roughly within your lifetime. Compare the 1930s to the 1950s, or the 1900s to the 1920s, or the 50s to the 70s.
Eh, some of the problem here is in the sheer prevalence of candid photographs in the last 40ish years as compared to previous decades. The records we have available to us now probably tend to favor the remarkable -- whatever someone found worth recording or advertising.
I think you mean "insisting that it has changed"?
Oh, yeah. Yes.
What's different is that the cliche of the 90s is not the same as the source of revulsion, whereas in the 70s and 80s, the cliched fashions overlapped nearly exactly with the source of revulsion. I have no idea why this is.
Part of the revulsion, in the case of the earlier styles, was from the idea that not only had the wearer not noticed that the clothes were ugly, they hadn't noticed that the clothes were cliched - something ugly can seem like a good idea at the time, but if you don't know that its a cliche that they're ugly then you're ipso facto a giant dork.
Nowadays people are more aware than they used to be of the possibility that you do know that it's a cliche that the clothes are ugly, but are wearing them anyway, because you like them (independence of mind), or would find it amusing to perform the part of someone who likes them, or some combination of those (irony). So that particular source of revulsion/contempt isn't the default any more. (I'm assuming that thinking of someone as being a fucking hipster leads to a quite different sort of contempt.)
You think? It seems pretty easy to identify who would be wearing outdated clothes out of irony and who would be wearing them out of blissful nerdiness. Age and general frumpiness would give it away.
(Possibly there is the same vitriol directed at frumpy middle aged women as ever. To my ear, though, it sounds like they're more likely to be criticized for their weight, and less likely to be criticized for their dated fashion choices.) Maybe it's gotten more common to haul Mom or Aunt Frumpy into Old Navy for some updated jeans, and she cooperates, whereas that would have (hypothetically) been more embarrassing/unthinkable thirty years ago.
393: Probably doesn't account for every case, but there's this rebound effect where even if the thing is being worn entirely straight, the fact that it has been worn knowingly by others affects how it's read. If you imagine some old guy wearing a seventies brown suit entirely straight, it gets read as having the aura of costume or irony even though he isn't thinking of it that way.
(What I think makes this more complicated is that we want a case where we agree that the style is straightforwardly ugly, despite being worn knowingly by some, but the fact that it's been ironised problematises that straightforward judgement. You start to see the style differently, through the eyes of its afficionados. Are seventies brown suits ugly?)
375 would have been a lot more effective if I had claimed that CC was basing his understanding of 1970s residential design wholly on the Brady Bunch.
Also, when I looked at that series of photos of the interns, it didn't make me instantly agree with you; it actually was pretty much in line with what I expected to see: a bunch of people wearing 'regular' clothes, with 1 or 2 outliers and 1 or 2 specifically dated-looking shirts (like the polo in 1990 with the tone-on-tone pattern of crests or whatever, a highly 80s look that would stand out like a brightly striped turtleneck, and would have 12 years ago).
One last thing, although this thread is dead anyway: the change from 80s to 90s, while it came late, was quite stark: I recall going to the NJ mall where I'd spent too much time in HS, maybe 4 years post-graduation, and all the sudden the girls all had flat hair. In my part of NJ, in the late 80s (and into the very early 90s), even the dullest, dorkiest (white) girls did that crazy hair thing, with the teased bangs (?). By 1994, nobody did.
If the rate of stylistic/cultural change is always and everywhere exactly occurring at the same speed, how can such a rapid switchover have occurred? Were the people hard at work on adding creativity to society extra-busy between '92 and '94, but then took the rest of the decade off? Since 199X-198X = N±0% (your explicit claim in 381.1), does that mean that '82 to '84 saw an identically-scaled switch? And then '02 to '04?
I recall going to the NJ mall where I'd spent too much time in HS, maybe 4 years post-graduation, and all the sudden the girls all had flat hair. In my part of NJ, in the late 80s (and into the very early 90s), even the dullest, dorkiest (white) girls did that crazy hair thing, with the teased bangs (?). By 1994, nobody did.
I will totally grant you that there was a dramatic shift in hairstyles from huge and teased to flat and product-free from 1991-1994. And has been much more stable since then.
If the rate of stylistic/cultural change is always and everywhere exactly occurring at the same speed, how can such a rapid switchover have occurred? Were the people hard at work on adding creativity to society extra-busy between '92 and '94, but then took the rest of the decade off?
Because it's hair. The other 7-or-so big categories were stable, while hair changed dramatically.
If we're looking at just hair, then hair was super stable from the mid-late-60s, when helmet teased beehives began to fall out of fashion, until the mid- 80s, when teased hair and perms began to make their ascent. You had small trends - afros, brushed out curly hair into a foggy nest, feathered hair, etc, but by and large, hairstyles from 1965 weren't that different from Breck girls of the 70s, and, for that matter, most of the hairstyles in the 90s. The basic changes were whether it should be super-straight or have some gentle wave to it.
If you take any single clothing item, it's going to have it's own unique lifeline, with crazy periods and normal periods.
My newest counterargument to the thesis that 1992-2012 is unusually stable is: today's fashion resembles the 1980s much more than the 1990s. (And yet it's not exactly the 80s - it's got a ton of quirks that are hard to see, because they're invisibly normal to us.)
Speaking of 70s residential design, I was raised in a house with four rooms done in shag carpet (one each red, orange, yellow, and blue). Also, two rooms with that low, sculpted carpet that I don't know the name for. Also, carpet in the kitchen and one of the bathrooms.
No. It's a lower pile than that. It had a texture that was varied, created a kind of floral effect even though it was all one color. The carpet was 3-D.
The pattern was largish, for carpet. Maybe six inch long whirls.
You know, Moby, heebie's going to have the last word in this thread so any further commenting is mere cruel and unusual prolongation.
Fine. First tell her that I didn't make up a type of carpeting. I'm not describing it well.
When you know you're right, you just leave a tab in your browser dedicated to the comment thread for easy access. But I appreciate your concern, Stormcrow.
This but looking more like small islands and whatnot?
404: Thanks. That is it, except ours was green.
interior fabric:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xchromosome/3058305645/
sweater:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sa_steve/2873485203/in/pool-73616815@N00/
403: I have feelings tabs too, you know.
Carpeted bathrooms. That's something you don't see much of anymore.
"These Chuck Norris Action Jeans are perfect for attacking diversity and fighting off minorities."
Wait, what? That's a real ad? What?
Yeah, I just noticed "multicultclassics.blogspot.com" written across the middle. I don't think that belongs in the "vintage advertising" flickr group.
I feel like I dimly recall the ad itself, though, just not the racist taglines.
White priviledge will do that to you.
Is it just an artifact of the relatively poor resolution of my monitor, or does this woman have genuinely frightening teeth?
415: well, right. That's what I was trying to clarify.
414: The ad mostly looks genuine -- I assume the goofy copy was photoshopped into a real ad.
Yeah, here's the genuine ad. Now I'm disappointed.
419. I don't think that's the original. The price is a different font than the rest of the ad, and badly justified.
Prices don't need justified, you commie. The market sets them.
Part of the tipoff that the ad you initially linked was a joke might have been the URL in the copy.
420: by "original", I meant non-photoshopped version of the ad in 411 (which has the same differently fonted, badly justified price). If you run an image serach in flickr for the ad, you'll get dozens of scans of it, with many at this price point and many at another, "original" price (or what I assume is the original because the font matches the rest of the ad). I think the differently fonted, badly justified price is authentic--I'm guessing the price for the product changed, and someone in an ad shop just pasted the new price onto the original ad in a semi-sloppy way.
420: The odd thing is there's no joke in the one linked in 419. The obvious Photoshopping extends only to a modernized price, and "Won't bind your legs".
For you purists, here is what I take to be the truly "original" version of the ad.
Original before the price reduction to $24.95.
420. I doubt it's photoshopping, there was inflation in the seventies. Here's a prior version:
http://scaryideas.com/content/2958
I worked in print shops, and am interested in analog typesetting in old ads. Usually anything interesting like this which looks genuinely hand-lettered but not by a specialist is reserved for brand names or slogans. Also original is like unique, does not admit qualification. It's a word that has already lost its meaning, since so many images are the products of many rounds of editing.
Oops, not hand-lettered in 428, look at the a and the s. Letraset, maybe, which was a way to do arbitrary baselines, but I thought that came later than 1945.
(FTR, I still think I was right, and find HG's LB-style hand waving at obvious items in my photographs to be strong evidence of that. [Rust colored down vest, with no label; fuscia pants and alpaca poncho; red/white checked shirt from 1975].)
I'm shocked that heebie persists in error.
I don't see how I was handwaving when I considered every item. The red/white checked shirt looks totally modern. Totally, completely like something you might find on J Crew this very moment.
The rest of the photos have disappeared, but from memory, of the list above:
The down vest: also a regular item. Not a marker of the 70s. L.L Bean would sell something exceedingly similar. Fuschia pants: Old Navy probably sells something exceedingly similar. Alpaca poncho: completely 70s, and you would not find something mainstream similar. But you would not be looked at askance if you wore it, either; people would assume you're a bit crunchy.
Seriously, Carp, these are mainstream items, besides the poncho.
Purple gingham men's shirt from J Crew.
Down vest, red sold out, from LL Bean.
And actually, Old Navy doesn't have red corduroys. Which I'm totally surprised by; I've got orange corduroys, red pants, purple pants, and green pants, none of which are worn in a flamboyant manner.
Which I'm totally surprised by
Times change.
What I can't understand is why no one but me agrees with my slightly different, but obviously totally correct argument, which resolves all issues and is the following (quoting myself from above!)
the argument isn't so much that other periods didn't borrow from aspects of other periods, but that they were obsessed with and valorized the new and innovative, whereas since about 1995 it's been cool precisely to be non-innovative and retro.
That does seem to me to capture something quite real about what's happened in popular music; perhaps less so in clothing, but innovation in clothing works somewhat differently from other cultural areas, and I do think that "this is the new look" has been replaced in value with "this is the new super-cool retro look" to some extent even in fashion. Compare the career of say, Gaultier or Christian Dior with the current lines of the major fashion houses.
This explains BOTH the anti-Heebie reactions in the thread AND 433. Holy shit am I right.
Speaking of fascists fashion, I have to think that the allure of "tacticool" is behind much of what's described in this article:
Of course, the other part of it, as the anarchists have been telling people for years, is that this militarization has less to do with international terrorists or drug kingpins than it does with suppressing dissent by regular citizens.
435: Well, mostly because I can't buy into it.
1. It has the whiff of something right, ie I know what you mean.
2. However, it is a fashion truism that everything is recycled, and this has been a truism ever since ladies magazines were first invented.
3. I don't have the cultural memory to know if this is actually newly retro, or just a way of recycling recycling.
4. I strongly believe that all commentary on current fashion is suspect, because we can't see ourselves clearly until we've gained some distance. Therefore I basically don't trust it.
Isn't 437.4 the opposite of "you just don't remember the silly shit you wore back in the 1980s"?
(above the "$" is not meant as a literal quote)
437 -- I think a key factor is that the internet has made it dramatically easier to document older styles. So it is so much easier to quickly get a sense of a previous era's styles. And there has been a dramatic decline in the perceived value of appearing to be wearing something new and innovative.
However, it has probably always been the case that clothing has long been more* prone to recycling content than other forms of cultural endeavor, and thus the post-1995 retrobsession may be less of a sea change there than it is in, say, music or movies.**
*Holy shit am I having a hard time restraining myself making a point about copyright law and piracy. How can I hold it in?
** Holy shit holy shit. I am about to explode! Yet, it is so boring for everyone.
You can't copyright a velour suit.
I would support an effort on behalf of the tailors of London, Paris and Naples to obtain recognition and protection (perhaps some sort of appellation d'origine contrôlée designation) of their respective chest and shoulder constructions. And perhaps the George Cleverley chisel toe shape.
Don't judge me.
Also, you can't copyright a fragrance, which I learned from early 90s TV and the combination Taco Bell/Hamm's dinner we had one day.
No, and perfumers seem resigned to, if not overjoyed about, it.
Resigned to not seeing Hamm's for sale?
Sure. It's a pretty Rabelaisian sector.
441. Halford, what do you think about Lessig?
437.4 certainly sums up this thread for me! (see 3).
447: I'd rather have a pretty, Rabelaisian sextor.
448 -- probably too long a conversation to have without boring everyone to tears. I liked a lot of Code and strongly support some things that he does, in particular I think that encouraging the use of Creative Commons licenses for people who want to use them is a very very good idea (though its limited adoption should be informative), and I think some of his criticisms are spot on. OTOH I also think he has a tendency to ignore or gloss over many of the benefits of copyright protection, one that comes to mind that he completely misses is the value of ownership in creating collaborative work on an industrial scale. Also he is given to extreme and largely silly phraseology sometimes and is kind of a blowhard in the manner of many law professors and public intellectuals.
That was probably too clipped to be useful.
Personal note: I came close to punching Lessig once, when, at a conference, he compared Southern California and Northern California to the South and the North in the Civil War; we had a mildly heated exchange over that analogy, which managed to push several of the R. Halford buttons at once. He apologized very kindly and gracefully.
To be clear, 451.3 is the only time I've met him, don't want to give the impression that we're personal buds or anything.
Even to a New Englander ignorant of Californian grudges, resentments and dudgeons, that analogy seems odd.
451.1 Clear to me, sensible. Any hope for video to survive a postpiracy world the way music has?
I am debating more alcohol while I wrap presents. For several days, running, cigarettes or meditation will be impossible for me while I try to keep peace.
That's really silly. I've always thought of Southern California more as Nazi Germany.
433 -- If we don't care about the difference between rust and red, or how big the squares are on the shirt, or what the collar looks like, and we also don't care about the whole point of the discussion: which is not about whether styles today are comparable to styles 30 years ago, but whether items in style in 1975 would have been really obviously out of style in 1985, then sure, they're the same.
No, that's the level of difference that people are accusing me of focusing on. This whole thread, people have asserted that I see big differences between the 90s and today because I differentiate between red and rust, or big checks and little checks. It's the same size difference as always.
I'm so exasperated with this stupid discussion. Everyone will thank me from the future for being so right.
Furthermore! Christ, I found similar shirts with different sized checks in about 30 seconds. A red shirt with your sized checks would look fine. The collar isn't even that outsized. People wear rust colored coats all the time. It's not a dated color in the least. Everyones credibility is totally ruined unless they agree with me in this thread.
Everyones credibility is totally ruined unless they agree with me in this thread.
I have to think you impeach your own credibility claiming that orange corduroy pants (or purple pants) can be worn with anything other than at least a mildly flamboyant manner.
Heebie, I just got here. Could you summarize the discussion so far for me?
Just click the link in 228, John. You can skip the rest.
Has anybody else been watching American Horror Story?
461: I'd love to.
1. Arguments that we've somehow "reached some stagnation of evolution because look at us, we've clearly stopped developing" always ring tinny.
2. Fashion is really complex, and there are many parallel trends and traits, each with has it's own lifespan. Each trait spikes and recedes on its own time schedule. Some eras have notable features, though.
3. For some reason, the 90s does not spark a sense of revulsion, the way both the 70s and 80s did, immediately after. In some ways, what people consider most revolting now is 90s wear - see Donna Martin, 90210 - but it happens not to overlap with the cliches everyone remembers (ie, Claire Danes, My So-Called Life).
I have no idea who Donna Martin is.
461 -- John, Heebie is amusingly dug in, inventing straw battalions, to defend an observably incorrect thesis. The facts, as you know well, are that fashion always changes, but the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s had rates of change that were markedly greater than the rate of change we see today (90s, 00s). Not high end fashion, but the clothes that ordinary people wear and appear to belong in their own time.
One proffered explanation is that the culture's potential for change has instead been channeled into technological innovation, and the resulting changes in behavior. I think a more likely explanation is that, just as with radio or retail airplay, the culture is in large part catering to a generation no longer interested in rapid change.
Heebie's position has been that fashions changed less than you think they did 50s-60s-70s-80s, and are changing more than you think they are 90s-00s: nothing is different now from those earlier periods. Except we're not revolted, so we don't see it now. Unless we're paying attention.
464 - What. The. Fuck.
But the 90210 styles (early seasons only -- I modeled a suit worn to my first wedding on an outfit worn by Steve Sanders in the late 90s decadent period of the show) appeared objectively hideous even at the time. Everyone hated Donna Martin's outfits/David Silver's earrings.
Heebie, would you say that Charley is really stupid?
464 - What. The. Fuck.
I've never seen an episode of 90210.
I've never been able to watch a relationship-based drama TV show. From Dallas through whatever is on now, I've missed them all.
One proffered explanation is that the culture's potential for change has instead been channeled into technological innovation female pubic hair.
I think a more likely explanation is that, just as with radio or retail airplay, the culture is in large part catering to a generation no longer interested in rapid change.
Please say more, because this sounds like total gibberish.
Heebie is still 100% correct.
To weigh in again!
469 -- Allow me to recommend the Tiffany Amber Thiessen era, along with "Donna Martin graduates" and "Kelly is addicted to cocaine" among so many other highlights.
In the early '90s I would have supported her in email.
I'm taking the morning off to go skiing. Heebie, if I see a rust colored down vest, I'll send you $5.
I've actually read a moderate amount of the thread, and I'm so out of touch that all the specific style references fly right past me.
465.2 is onto something, can check by looking at culture not aimed at the middle-aged.
Is this a hip contemporary design or something visibly dated?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17617493@N00/367931350/
What about barbed wire, also popular 10-15 years ago?
Older tattoos reflect the fashions at the time, nothing wrong with them-- but it would be exceptionally tone-deaf to try showing them off as something bracing and contemporary.
And this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/90723082@N00/138045254/
Would this fit well this year?
Clothes are the wrong layer to focus on.
477: In the early '90s I would have supported her in email.
But now he's doing it through twitter, what with the potential for change being channeled into technological innovation and all.
The thing I remember most about Beverly Hills, 90210 (not to be confused with 90210, the name of a show that started in 2008 and runs currently) was how desperately eleven-year-old me wanted to have sideburns* like some of the main characters. They looked so cool, man.
*Speaking of fashions that made a comeback
All explanations for something you don't believe is happening sound like gibberish. How do you explain the revulsion gap? Isn't it commercially convenient?
Indeed, I would venture that early season 90210 may indicate the death throes of innovation-obsessed popular culture before the retromamia/stasis era. It was precisely the efforts of the Kellys, steves, Donnas and Davids to appear innovative that made them -- at the time and increasingly over time -- appear to be ridiculous.
I mentioned previosly that I saw an episode of My So Called life in which Clare Danes dresses up as a "50s" girl for Halloween. Little did she know that a mere two years later her exact outfit would be worn nationwide as the "hipster librarian" look.
All explanations for something you don't believe is happening sound like gibberish.
I realize you didn't leave it there, but I'm loving this as a rejoinder.
"So, when the four humors get out of alignment, a wood spirit alights and steals the phlogiston from your chakras."
"That makes no sense."
"But don't you see? Of course it doesn't make sense to you! You don't believe it's happening!"
"Don't believe what is happening?"
"I just told you!"
How do you explain the revulsion gap?
Unless we close the revulsion cap, we won't be able to protect Corduroy and Matsu.
Okay, 484.1 is a joke. Yes? 90210 marked the death of innovation and the birth of retro-cool? Sweet christmas.
I think it must be a joke. So that's good.
Mostly a joke, but the early season BH 90210 was marketed as a "here's the new (style) thing" in a way that would be unthinkable today. Compare e.g. Gossip Girl, which is similarly salacious in content but in which the characters make no effort to appear stylistically innovative.
Maybe they're making the effort, but you're now too old to notice.
Compared to 90210 in the early days, approximately three people watch Gossip Girl.
485 -- Sure. Try explaining the processes of evolution, and evidence for them, to someone who believes in a six day creation in 4,000 BC.
Anyhow, Gossip Girl is pitched at people in their thirties who want to relive the 90210 days. The influentially stylistically innovative shows are far more likely to be on the Disney Channel.
Also, as we're getting towards the 500 mark, it must be time to link this.
Having watched at least seventeen minutes of My So-Called Life when it was originally broadcast and run into Claire Danes on the Delta Shuttle, I feel qualified to say (i) it wasn't that great a show, Generations X and Y -- for Christ's sake let it and Sassy go, and (ii) she is, like most actresses, petite-approaching-minute.
No, I am absolutely correct about this. The Gossip Girl characters are supposed to be well-dressed and perfectly styled, but their style is not supposed to suggest innovation or a new trend valued solely for its newness alone. They are perfectly curated, not newly created. And there, my friends, lies the crucial distinction between the pre-stasis/retromamia era and today.
497: because you are their target demographic, oldster.
495: Christ, does Portland need another reason to look soulfully up its own butt instead of developing an economy that employs even a measurable portion of the hipsters, hippies and slackers attracted there?
Are we linking to Grantland now? Really?
Sorry, it is an unacceptable source for evidence of '90s fashion nostalgia? I should maybe have checked Granta?
Sorry. I have an irrationally negative reaction to apologias for fandom, the detritus thereof and ESPN's exploitation of both.
They have apologias for fandom there? I just read the sports book reviews.
It's like Borges' Library of Babel, only filled with monographs on the secret relationship between Entourage and Mark Cuban's polo shirts.
Ah, Simmons. That he has managed to position himself as both a Clippers and Celtics fan in the current climate does not in any way incline the Halford brain towards thoughts of homicide.
507: To sustain the theme of HBO dramas to which Simmons is wont, Simmons is a Turtle who thinks he's Tony Soprano.
will my continued efforts to agree with heebie be for naught? please, halford, have your personal assistant go find a 1998 cosmopolitan magazine, read the articles, and look at the ads. come back, and make your arguments with a straight face. I motherfucking double dog dare you. if you will come back, with scans, which support the thesis outlined in the article, I will...jesus, I'll pay you $500 but it would be impossible to determine an arbiter. no--I nominate john emerson.
If you don't like Simmons you should love Grantland; ESPN brass basically took control of it away from him, and he was bitching before launch about how terrible it was going to be (he even hates the name).
Yet the thesis of the article is not -- quite -- my thesis, Al. You have failed sadly to distinguish between the subtle shifts in argumentation that have taken place over the course of the thread.
However, in support of the Carp point (a subtly different one than my own!) I offer you 1972-1982 vs 2002-today. I think we all know which of these wins "more different" in a heartbeat.
510: I hate ESPN, Malcolm Gladwell, Charles Pierce and David Eggers, too, of course. Klosterman can be OK.
Just flip a coin because that's what I will do. I'm really more on top of Nestorian Christology than I am with this shit.
Emerson is having sex with Nestorian christology? Don't do that, John, it's dangerous.
I desperately want to jump in and be disagreeable about this, but I can't get past "Honestly, both sides are making good points. Surely the real problem is that we haven't arrived at a mutually acceptable synthesis of the various positions."
Which I think means that I'm doing the disagreeableness thing wrong.
I'm on Team Heebie, and I'm going skiing too. I'll try to find Charley and lecture at him on a chair lift.
512: huh, Klosterman is my very least favorite. I like Pierce the best of that lot, I suppose.
I desperately want to jump in and be disagreeable about this, but I can't get past
...my complete and utter lack of interest in fashion trends.
Yeah, there's some of that going on too. That normally wouldn't keep me from arguing, but it does mean that I have no idea at all what I'm talking about.
My disinterest in fashion is such that I didn't realize my pants cuffs and shoes were caked in mud until I sat down at the office.
I offer you 1972-1982 vs 2002-today. I think we all know which of these wins "more different" in a heartbeat.
I just don't think this is a slam dunk, the way a lot of people in this thread seem to.
Seems like a slam dunk to me:
Seems like a slam dunk to me:
Goddammit, somebody put a body on Halford before he dunks again!
Halford's right: there is a much bigger change between 1972 and 1982 than there is between 1982 and 1982.
Why would a google image search of fashions from 1972 or 1982 be informative?
Stop asking questions and box out, Tweety!
Halford's right, though. You couldn't imagine somebody wearing this in 1972. Er, wait in 2002. Oh darnit, now I'm confused.
Why wouldn't it be, for showing rates of change? Oh snap I just dunked in your face.
529 -- wait, did you just literally pick an example that shows the retro noninovativeness of the present moment? OH SNAP.
530: because the set of images that are likely to have been put on the web associated with the terms "1972 fashion" or "1982 fashion" are likely to be much more associated with the retrospective excesses of those decades than they are to be with the full landscape of clothing at the time. A search for "2002 fashion" or (most especially) "2011 fashion" is going to be much more heterogeneous, because the story of the iconic excesses of ten years ago is still being written, and the story of iconic excesses of today would be incomprehensible to us right now. Not to mention which the internet and digital photography existed in those later eras, which utterly changes what kind of images are preserved, and really really changes what kind of images are put on the internet. It's almost as silly as doing a search for "2010 fashion" in Redbook back issues from 1971-19789. You may well find something, but it's not going to be representative of what people at the time thought they were producing.
531: Those clothes would have been completely ridiculous and costumey and absurd in 2002. In '92 they would have been painfully hideous. It's possible that I'm missing the subtle gradations in your point, but if you're really arguing that the appeal of lagging retro has increased over the past 20 years from the 80s (big '50s thing) or the 70s (big, and embarrassing, '40s big band-disco-crossover thing) then that's even sillier than the argument in the OP.
But the 2011 fashion search is the one that's heavily focused on runway shows and current trends as opposed to slice of life magazine covers, so the issue you raise is at least offset on the other end with the contemporary search. It's like Dominique Wilkins and Blake Griffin made babies.
What does it mean to "literally pick an example"? I mean, how would one pick an example non-literally? "Pick an example" isn't a metaphor. To the extent it's an idiom (debatable) it was used here idiomatically, not literally.
This must be one of the slowest-moving long threads in Unfogged history. But then, Unfogged changed much more rapidly between 2003 and 2004, or 2004 and 2005, than between 2010 and 2011.
Dude it's not hard to understand. The rate of change, while it hasn't fallen to zero, has slowed since 1995 from where it was roughly 1940-1995. Similarly, while culture (fashion in particular) has long recycled things from previous periods, the valorization of the retro is greater now, and the valorization of the new and innovative is much less.
I declare comity incomensurability.
537: why is that on the other hand? It seems to agree perfectly well with heebie's contention that things just keep on changin'.
535: what? No it isn't. 1. magazine covers aren't "slice of life", you maniac, and 2. contemporaneous coverage of runway shows covers much wider ground than after-the-fact cherrypicking of iconic looks. Plenty of designers come up with ideas and lines that turn out to influence nobody.
539: right, so, that's totally absurd, is what I'm saying.
I think it has to do with the rise of income inequality. Poor people are wearing the same clothes as they wore in 1995 because they can't afford new ones.
Anyhow while I feel like there's no way to look more foolish than to indulge in trendspotting getoffmylawnism when one gets a bit removed from one's youth, I'm actually perfectly comfortable with as many people as want to making themselves look foolish on this matter, and I also have a plane to catch in a bit. So have fun.
Poor people are wearing the same clothes as they wore in 1995 because they can't afford new ones of 90210 aspirationalism.
545: I'm actually perfectly comfortable with as many people as want to making themselves look foolish
Your glib self-serving characterization of their position certainly puts you in that category, mon frère.
Well, I didn't read the thread.
I actually hate their position too, but for different reasons. As well as the original article KR references because what I really hate are the terms of the debate per my comment 81.
I gearing up for Christmas cheer real good here...
Hey, I agree with 81. So does Santa.
Santa's a fucking perv stalker.
As soon as I can get out of here, I'm off until 1/3/2012. Maybe I'll buy some new clothes with all the free time.
Pick up some cargo pants and a tie-dye smiley face shirt.
545 -- I believe it is, in fact, an ideological fear of looking old that is preventing folks here from acknowledging the obvious, demonstrable empirical truth of the two theses in 539. But we should recognize those ideological blinders for what they are.
I kinda agree with Stormcrow's point in 81 but that's a problem that just comes up whenever you speak of culture or cultural change in the aggregate.
Santa's a fucking perv stalker.
Won't someone please go to a library and scan the first couple pages of mens, womens, and juniors from Sears or a demographically similar catalog? Please?
Let's see.
Scenes from the 1983 Sears catalog
That feels like a dagger three pointer. Admittedly it's harder to find a catalog from 2002 online, but even this gallery, which emphasizes only the most outrageous trends of the early 2000s, feels like less of a difference from today than the 1972-1983 change.
Lest the 1970s link above be accused of bias, here are images from the Sears 1972 catalog.
I think it's just irrefutable that the rate of change 1972-1982 vastly exceeds the rate of change from 2002-the present.
Halford, the reason I ask is to get a fair sample--all the 'historical' links you are providing are anecdote. Collect data fairly or collect not at all, punk.
Flickr's advanced search tab allows restriction by the date the photo was taken.
I really think that 465.2 is onto something, both in the size of the boomer cohort and in their interest in dressing the way they did when they were younger rather than like today's kids.
Also the defensiveness is interesting-- as far as I can tell, everyone arguing for diminished change in clothes is in their forties or older, while those arguing for undiminished churning are 40 or younger.
The past is another counrty, and it's hard to talk with foreigners, I guess.
Huh? The 1983 image is the complete Sears catalog for 1983. The 1970s images are somewhat more selective but not much so, you have large portions of the 1972 Sears catalog right there. That's not made up. The 2002 link is to Elle's view of ready to wear collections, so a little more high end, but probably not wildly off what people were wearing around 2002. There are undoubtedly better images you can find with a bit more searching, but I think the evidence is overwhelming that 1972-1982 has more change than 2002-present.
I think heebie is all wet on this one, and I'm well under 40.
562 to 559. And I'm under 40!
I'm just trying to be scientistic, halford. It so happens that I'm in complete agreement with you on the facts (if not the causes).
Ooh, we need all the Sears cats to make eigenclothes!
Huh. OK, but post pictures of what you're wearing.
I'm firmly in the middle. I think fashion change has slowed but nowhere near stopped in the last twenty years -- everyone saying "No, nineties clothes would totally look weird today" is right. But everyone saying "But clothes really haven't changed as much since the nineties as they did over prior decades post-1920 or so" is also right.
Heebie's all wet, but mostly because she's denying that there's anything at all to be said on the other side.
I think fashion change has slowed but nowhere near stopped in the last twenty years
Oh, I agree with that, absolutely. It's just a question of rate of change.
Heebie's all wet, but mostly because
...I just have that effect on young women.
569: It's just a question of rate of change.
It really is such a derivative era.
570: "Oh shit, it's that old dude and his water balloons again."
"You looked better in the Santa hat."
I think all this is just based on the fact that people dressed weirder in 1972 than ever before since. Look at this picture. That's Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Chuck Percy. During a hearing, on the Senate floor. They both have sideburns! They both have wide, garish ties! Look at the hair of that staffer behind them!
Flickr's advanced search tab allows restriction by the date the photo was taken.
Yeah, but for most photos taken before the invention of the digital camera, that date is anywhere from ten to 100 years off.
Also Kennedy is holding a cabbage for some reason. Here's another one of Percy.
Nestorius became bishop of Constantinople in 428. He came from the Antioch school and was taught theology there by Theodore of Mopsuestia. He opposed a relatively new theological and devotional slogan Theotokos - affirming that Mary was the "God-bearer" or "Mother of God." Nestorius was concerned with the thought that God might be seen to have had a new beginning of some kind, or that he suffered or died. None of these things could happen to the infinite God. Therefore, instead of a God-man, he taught that there was the Logos and the "man who was assumed." He favored the term "Christ-bearer" (Christotokos) as a summary of Mary's role, or perhaps that she should be called both "God-bearer" and "Man-bearer" to emphasize Christ's dual natures. He was accused of teaching a double personality of Christ. Two natures, and two persons. He denied the charge, but the term Nestorianism has always been linked with such a teaching.
I love the video in 495 so much it's not even funny.
576.1: It was the style at the time
I am really enjoying the mead I am drinking right now from the skulls of my vanquished enemies, Heebie and Tweety. Tastes good.
All in the spirit of Christmas, of course.
Mead is for nerds. Also, I am not responding because I am in an airport during the holidays and need to conserve my strength to beat fellow travelers to death. But you are obvs still wrong.
There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.
One proffered explanation is that the culture's potential for change has instead been channeled into technological innovation, and the resulting changes in behavior. I think a more likely explanation is that, just as with radio or retail airplay, the culture is in large part catering to a generation no longer interested in rapid change.
If anyone cares to explain how this results in fashion slowing down, I'm all ears. Or where to find this "generation no longer interested in rapid change." At the Apple store?
Heebie's position has been that fashions changed less than you think they did 50s-60s-70s-80s, and are changing more than you think they are 90s-00s: nothing is different now from those earlier periods. Except we're not revolted, so we don't see it now. Unless we're paying attention.
This is basically right, with the additional caveat that fashion is not monolithic whatsoever. There are tons of parallel lines and independent traits rising and falling on their own schedule.
I'm taking the morning off to go skiing. Heebie, if I see a rust colored down vest, I'll send you $5.
Obviously you would be more likely to see such a thing in Missoula than on the ski slopes.
All explanations for something you don't believe is happening sound like gibberish. How do you explain the revulsion gap? Isn't it commercially convenient?
TBH, after this comment I've lost interest.
516 -- Can't believe we missed each other -- I'm downtown now, my $5 safely still in my possession, and yet even more embarrassed by my scheduling faux pas* than I am by being Wrong About Fashion.
* Totally forgot a lunch date with EM's step-dad. It's really embarrassing.
Here's the definitive stuff:
http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/00352/timeline.html
TBH, after this comment I've lost interest.
The skull-mead, it tastes so sweet.
Or where to find this "generation no longer interested in rapid change."
I assumed that was a reference to the Baby Boomers.
Or where to find this "generation no longer interested in rapid change."
587: Holy Shit. That site totally fulfills the site design expectations from something sponsored by Oracle.
TBH, after this comment I've lost interest.
She gets us all excited, and then just walks off.
I think that pants and shirts may have shown different rates of change. We should start over with that in mind.
I know I often will wear the same pants for half a week, while I change shirts every day.
I just thought of someone who is truly keeping up the fashion innovation in an age of cultural sclerosis and retromania: DJ Lance Rock. Perhaps the children are our future.
Young women of 2030 will want tall black guys with huge orange hats, young men of 2030 will want sexy yoga-performing latinas to put them to sleep. Perhaps we can hope for the revival of culture then.
I dream of the day when a television hostess is judged by the sexiness of her yoga routine and not the color of her skin.
There's a picture of DJ Lance Rock on the flickr site.
It's always absolutely in On Demand here.
Whoa that is the cutest thing ever.
I was trying for "always available" but my phone thought differently.
602: Thanks, but did you notice my kids?
I just checked the flickr pool and have no idea what you people are talking about.
I was unfamiliar with DJ Lance Rock until now. He looks like the results of casting Humpty Hump as the Fifth Doctor.
There's a picture of John Emerson dressed like DJ Lance Rock from Yo Gabba Gabba. It's pretty cute.
I mean, that is John Emerson, right?
When a man and a woman really love each other, a stork brings them babies to take photos of.
I just logged in again and still have no idea what you're talking about.
You don't see DJ Lance Rock in the flickr Unfogged group? Standing around with an octopus?
How far back do I have to look? I don't see it anywhere recently. The most recent photo was posted Dec. 19th. ("Ideology in the public library".)
Oh, I found it. That's not really John Emerson.
I am unable to access my supposed photo. The password and URL were lost in a gardening accident.
Related, I found the name under which apostopher has been playing his rootsy tunes all these years.
It's like our own personal Wonderlic test!
Until reading up on Wikipedia, I hadn't realized that there was a controversy over Nina's predecessor on the Good Night Show. Apparently this happened:
In the summer of 2000, Martinez was cast to play the role of a student in two 30-second videos, I Have a Future (filmed in July 2000) and Boys Can Wait (filmed in February 2001). Both short films spoofed abstinence-only public service announcements. The former espoused the virtues of anal sex, while the latter promoted vibrators. The political spoofs were directed by David Mack and produced by John Ordover, and were hosted on the website TechnicalVirgin.com. In July 2006, PBS KIDS Sprout terminated Martinez as host of the Good Night Show when it learned of these videos, which it deemed "inappropriate for her role as a preschool host."
What an outrage! Now I have to feel guilt and anger while watching sexy yoga aimed at preschoolers with my child.
I can't remember what I argued here, but I was clearly right.
624: The archives, Halford. Everything is in the archives.
I learned about the whole thing from this site, because I am a shut-in with no other sources of information about the world.
Would you like to subscribe to the newsletter?
black cocktail dress by mignon little black dress mi hy0255
