My observation – and this may just be my own experience – is that kids these days seem to be more accepting of many different kinds and time periods of music than, say, kids of my time in the 80s and 90s were. It’s not like we didn’t listen to older music, but I feel like tastes are far more eclectic these days, especially as Tik Tok videos and memes draw from all sources.
I was sitting here several months ago at the computer and all of a sudden I hear Balkan music and singing in what sounded to me like a South Slavic language. WTH? I walk into the other room and my 7-year-old (at the time) is blasting “Helikopter” by Fazlija, a Bosnian performer. It was from a video meme. Similarly, their favorite song is “Georgio by Moroder” by Daft Punk. The meme is just a 10 second snippet of the song, but they love listening to the full 9-minute song. Then they’ll go play some Rick Astley, followed by some hyperpop like Glaive. It’s all over the effing place.
The other thing I wonder about is language. How much new slang has appeared in the last decade? For me, it’s a lot, but it’s also because I have kids now so am more exposed to it (though I was exposed to it via the internet). The great thing about slang now is you can actually look up what these words mean. For me, when I hear stuff like “suss,” “sussy baka,” “cringe,” “aesthetic” (to mean “pretty”), “bruh” (instead of “bro” or “bra”), “rando,” flex," “lowkey,” “simp,” and a host of others, those words really tie it to the current time period and maybe 5 or so years prior.
I know language is constantly in flux, but these terms also solidify a time and place and are decade markers, in my mind.
Almost everything listed in that article seems totally normal to me and wouldn’t even catch my attention if I saw someone on the street wearing them. I’m not even sure if the top image accompanying the article is supposed to be from 20 years ago or current.
For the me, the thing that will date movies from aughts the most is the style of cell phone. If you see a character whip out a flip phone, that’s a sure sign the movie was made before 2008 or so. After that you most everyone using smart phones on screen.
Which is strange, because if I saw someone with trucker hats or all over prints or hoodies over blazers or shutter shades or Bieber hair or skinny jeans or fedoras (esp fedoras which were popular for like 5 years all of a sudden) or random scarves for no reason, I’d wonder if they got lost on their way from a 2000s costume party. Well maybe random people may wear a trucker hat, but they aren’t doing it because it’s fashionable.
And the top picture looks hilariously out of date to me. Kanye looks like he maaay be able to get by in 2022, but he’d have to change that jacket.
Yeah, ‘lit’ was big in the 2000s, but you don’t really hear it anymore. It’s basically been replaced by “bussin”. The early 2010s had “yeet” all over the place. “Sus” is everywhere now.
Not sure I’d ever seen those shutter shades on anyone before, but what makes skinny jeans seem old? I see them every day. They’re just… jeans. And Black guys wearing clothing like that photo, I see stuff like that all the time too, during the colder months at least.
I think I’d laugh if I saw any black dudes wearing clothes like that. Maybe we’ve just moved beyond it in Atlanta, but I can’t remember the last time I saw guys wearing the semi-sideways hat with big ass prints on their shirts.
Skinny jeans have fallen out of favor in the last half decade, if not more (the anti-skinny jean trend has been led especially by Gen Z, in a reaction to Millennials). It’d be really strange for me to see any these days (because even though Millennials used to wear them, as you get older, you generally want more comfortable clothes )
Undoubtedly true. Although the youth of today do have music celebrities that they lip sync to, read BuzzFeed articles about and swoon over (even I know about Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello - and I’m 42). There are no doubt fascinating sociological reasons for this which I am failing to conjure at the moment.
I was going to say something like this. One of the biggest changes in pop music over the last decade has been the acceptance of other cultures into the American pop music mainstream. Up until maybe 2010 it was almost unheard of for a hugely successful act in America to come from a non-English speaking country. Now, the biggest act in the world, including in the US, is BTS, and they sing mostly in Korean. There are many other examples.
I agree, and I think it’s a consequence of not being essentially locked in to what’s played on the radio and sold at the record stores. They can now listen to all sorts of stuff from all over the country and world if they so choose, without any real effort or cost relative to what it took back in decades past.
Which is why it doesn’t seem like the trends are as… intense. They draw out longer, and don’t peak nearly so high.
I wouldn’t say “current”, but I’d go so far as to say that very few of those were nearly as ubiquitous or defining as say… some of the 80s or 90s hairstyles or clothing.
What about empire waistline dresses? Those seem to be fairly popular in the late 2000s/early 2010s, but I don’t feel like I see them as much. (ETA: Oh shit, a quick search seems to say they’re becoming big again. Not a fan of that fashion.) Perhaps they’ve always been popular and around, but that’s when I noticed them enough to learn what in the hell they’re called.
Yoga pants, too. Hell, just wearing pajama bottoms out in public while shopping didn’t seem to me to really take off until the 2000s. Bohemian chic also feels 2000s to me (like peasant blouses). Low rise jeans? And then wasn’t there a period where “mom jeans” were stylish? Like in the 2010s? Pants with words on the butt? Pink (as in the brand)? Uggs? Knit hats? Capris?
I think the issue is that few of these things ever struck me as a big fashion deal in the first place, since (I would guess) they were embraced by a much smaller percentage of the population than embraced fashions and trends in the past. The exception to me would be Bieber hair, which was on the heads of a lot of kids of a certain age group at one point.
Not enough people were into these things at the time, and not enough people were paying attention. So, for example, if someone were sporting a messenger bag now, how many people would see it and think, “Ooh, that’s so dated!” Yet, when someone has 80’s mall hair, I think a lot of people (and not necessarily old people) would see it and think, “What’s with the 80s hair?!”
Back in the 20th century, I posted here that when people talk about “The 60s”, they’re thinking of hippies and Beatles and Vietnam (and its protests) and Nixon… and almost every event happened between 1964 and 1972.
So even saying a decade has defining events or fashions or behaviors, they probably won’t conveniently split right in handy ten-year chunks, let alone be divided at years ending in zero.
Back then, I posited that maybe decades/attitudes/generations should be labeled by the traumas or public events that they had to deal with, that defined their attitudes.
So you’d have the Kennedy Assassination Generation (where we had our optimism shattered), the Watergate Generation (lost trust in government and officials), and of course now we have the 9/11 Generation, and the Pandemic Generation.
I’m with Eyebrows_0f_Doom, nothing in those photos of the early 2000s would, well, raise an eyebrow for me. If it were a quiz, “Name the decade: 2000, 10s or 20s”, I would flunk it, I reckon.
The closest to a concrete change is the change in men’s suits as made famous by the photo comparing the 2003 to 2017 basketball team photos (link). But I’d still put that one in a special bracket because suit bagginess has oscillated many times through history.
And I’m not sure how representative that 2003 photo is anyway. I recently cleared out some suits from approximately that time and they were nowhere near that baggy.
This is what I’m talking about with the Friends comparison. Ross, Candler, and Joey are practically swimming in their clothes compared to later men’s fashion. And in the comments, it was pointed out that in 2003 you had many black celebrities who wore baggy suits - Cedric the Entertainer, Bernie Mac, Steve Harvey etc. And many people ion that thread were talking about how 90s and early 2000s suits were very boxy and baggy. Though NBA players in the draft are inclined to exaggerate fashion trends.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. Watch the 1974 version of Gone in 60 Seconds. It’s full of street scenes of people who didn’t even know they were being filmed (ie not extras). The overwhelming majority of them wore clothing and hairstyles that would not have garnered a second look from someone living in the 1950s.
Part of the problem is that we always want to compare the fashion that surrounds us in real life with the less ephemeral artifacts of previous decades that by their nature represent the cutting edge of fashion; not the de facto fashion prevailing at the time.
Someone earlier in the thread responded to my post about metrosexuals in the 2000s and hipsters in the 2010s with something along the lines of “Sure, they existed, but they didn’t dominate the culture”. The thing is, one could say the same thing about hippies in the 1960s. I’m sure if if someone were to look at random street scenes from 1969, the vast majority of the people in them would not be hippies.
And even many of the “hippies” still had basic conservative haircuts. Some of them had office jobs… in fact, many jobs required “hair above the ears and not touching the shirt collar” for men.
I was just a bit too young for Woodstock but some of my friends’ older siblings* went, and their pictures were full of “plain, ordinary teenagers”… and a few outlandish hippie-types.
*In fact, those kids were some of the most strident anti-war/anti-government/pro-weed protestors I’ve ever seen, and they all looked like Richie Cunningham or Patty Duke… or Wally Cleaver.
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