I often find that people born in a certain decade have distinguishable physical features that suggest they’re born in that era, in much the same way people of different racial backgrounds will tend towards certain averages of physical features.
People under 25 seem to have a more “transgendered” look to them than previous generations. Models like Kate Upton and Karlie Kloss would have been called drag queens 10 years ago, but today are considered very attractive and feminine looking. Even Taylor Swift has a look that would have been considered masculine 15 years ago.
I think men have been gradually getting less masculine in appearance for a long time, maybe even as far back as the Baby Boomers as people like Brad Pitt would definitely not be considered masculine during the middle of the 20th century. Women on the other hand, I’d argue hit “peak feminine” appearance-wise in the cohort born in the 1980s and are starting to look a bit more masculine.
The reason I say that is because the actresses and singers born in the 90s, like Kristen Stewart, Lorde, Demi Lovato, and Miley Cyrus have more of a “handsome” appearance than the ones born in the 80s like Hilary Duff, Scarlett Johansen, and Christina Aguilera who tend to look more stereotypically feminine. The male stars also seem more gender-ambiguous like Justin Bieber and One Direction, even compared to NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys.
The biggest problem with your theory is you are selecting celebrities as if they somehow represent what a generation of people look like. The only thing that could possibly prove, if there was merit to the theory in the first place, would be a shift in what might be socially considered attractive. Not any change in how people actually look.
As someone who was a teenager on the 80s and 90s, I find this claim remarkable, to say the least. None of these women seems in any way masculine, much less “drag queen” material. In what way would you say that Karlie Kloss is less feminine than Kate Moss? Or Kate Upton more like a drag queen than Liz Hurley? Because I am really not seeing it. All models tend to be a little… distinctive in appearance, but there is nothing masculine about those women that I can see. And the suggestion that Taylor Swift is in any possible way masculine leaves me mystified.
Really? Brad Pitt was less masculine than Paul Newman or Rudolph Valentino at the same age? Pretty Boy leading men have been a staple of Hollywood for at least 100 years. Pitt is no different.
Umm, you just said that Taylor Swift, born 1989, was less masculine than Hillary Duff, born 1987. So which is it. Are women born in the 80s more masculine, or less? And can you tell us whether these women are more or less feminine then, say, Leann Rimes, born 1982.
So is Taylor Swift masculine, or is she sterotypically feminine? You seem to be saying both.
And in what sense is Miley Cyrus(1992) less feminine than, say Pink(1979), Gwen Stefani(1969) or Madonna(1958)? I don’t find any of these women to be particularly feminine, but that was never their schtick. They all tried really hard to cultivate an image of being tough, non-nonsense with a blatant sexuality rather than stereotypically, girly “feminine”.
Honestly? One Direction and Justin Beiber are is more sexually ambiguous than Marilyn Manson from the 90s, Poison from the 80s or Skyhooksfrom the 70s?
I call bullshit on that one.
Male pop acts have been deliberately ambiguous since at least Little Richard. Androgyny is part of the image. To suggest that any top 40 act of today can hold a candle to MM, Skyhooks or Poison seems laughable. The most effeminate popular male acts of today are demonstrably less feminine than the acts of previous decades.
Your examples are pretty odd, but yes, people’s appearance is largely a function of how they wear their hair and makeup, their diet, fitness levels, their clothes all of which is a function of their age and the predominant style of the time period.
Also, you are cherry picking celebrities, not the general population. That would also be more a reflection of what’s popular than what is “normal”.
Basically the gist is she wasn’t a whole lot bigger than current celebrities and supermodels. But the difference in size between current models and the average woman are a whole lot more pronounced now than in Marilyn’s day because people are so much fatter now.
Not sure about the era but I have noticed certain geographic locations have a tendency to have a certain look. George Clooney has that distinctive Appalachian mountain man look so common to the moonshiners and mountain men of that region. Handsome as he is you can see that look on his face and in his eyes.
Before the 1970s, although there were of course pockets of it in the 20s and 30s, Dietrich being an easy example. But before the 00s, I think androgyny was a relatively isolated “look,” carefully chosen and cultivated by individuals trying to stand out for it. The “metrosexual” look began to shift that a bit to the more general public, and today even with those beards and lumberjack clothes, you’ve got more groomed eyebrows and skin care products keeping men’s skin soft and smooth than my grandfather ever would have dreamed of.
Female androgyny is, at the moment, mostly a high fashion and entertainment thing, with exaggerated tits and ass predominant in the popular sector. Much more so than in the 80s or 90s. Our current female silhouette harkens to the ultra feminine 1950s more than any other.
There’s a scene in Dead Poet’s Society where Robin Williams asks the students to look at old photos of previous classes which were behind a glass in the main hallway, and the implication was that they LOOKED different but had the same fears and hopes.
When I look at photos from older eras, the people do look different, but I am not sure if it is solely fashion/hairstyles/photo quality.
I do believe that previous generations were TOUGHER than baby boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y, and it may show by style, although some factors such as height, weight, and fitness may further distinguish eras.
I’ve been wondering that too recently, since I noticed that the ghostly glee club in the Haunted Mansion seemed time-appropriate even though I didn’t notice anything different about their hair. Perhaps they just looked WASPy although I don’t see any that look like that today. Perhaps their facial expressions were somehow different?
I think it does affect your appearance, but not the way that you’re noticing it. I think it’s simply a matter of we’re bigger, taller, and fatter now. In old photos there’s some “quality” I notice about their faces that makes me think of them as from an era of the 1940’s or earlier. And I think the quality I’m noticing, aside from the haircuts and the clothes is - they’re lean. Their faces are lean, because most of them aren’t fat. People tended towards being a little shorter and more wiry looking than we do today. There were more outside and factory laborers so more of them have that lean muscle look and a burnt-in tan if they worked outdoors that makes their skin look and hang different than our pasty indoor face skin.
But past that time period, it’s more a matter of fashion to get the look right.
Yeah, I was going to point out that back in the 80s and 90s, the main thing about Kate Upton would have been that she wasn’t rail-thin like most of the SI models of that era. I hate to say it, as I think she’s pretty hot, but she would have been considered “fat” when I was in high school and college, not any sort of curvy paragon of feminine beauty. It was generally more acceptable for celebrities to have less curves and smaller boobs than to be fat at the time, which is somewhat different nowadays.
I think what the OP’s noticing is whatever’s in vogue for celebrities at any given time, along with a dose of the fact that androgynous prettiness seems to always be the thing for younger celebrity men, although not necessarily for older ones.
Lots of things will affect the expressions on our face. The longer we hold an expression the more it will be reflected into wrinkles and possibly even development of small facial muscles. Sleep, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, sunshine, and most any other state of mind you can come up with create subtle differences in expression, why wouldn’t different mindsets leave a permanent mark on out faces?
Are you saying that men wearing long hair was an isolated look in the 1960s? Or that women wearing page boy cuts and pants suits was an isolated look in the 60s?
I think that the what is happening here here is that, while those fashions were both widespread and outrageously androgynous at the time, you no longer see them as androgynous precisely because they were widespread, and so have become the norm. But at the time those fashions widely decried as gender bending.
In another 30 years time, whatever “androgynous” fashions of today have become mainstream will no longer be seen as androgynous either. they will, by definition, have become normal.
So even though we have moved towards hypermasculine lumberjack clothes, gym muscled bodies and mountain man beards, you contend that men are *more *androgynous because they use skin care products.
Couldn’t you say the same thing about any era? Even though young men in the 17th centurywere constantly armed and emulated military fashions, they wore powdered wigs. Even though young men in the 50s wore jeans, t-shirts and leather or denim jackets, they also used a lot of hair oil and groomed ceaselessly?
It seems tome that at *any *time in history men’s fashion is a deliberate dichotomy between *some *hypermasculine aspects and *some *traditionally feminine aspects. I can’t see any validity in saying that the use of hair oil and combs wasn’t androgynous in the 50s, but the use of skin carr products and eyebrow trimmers is androgynous today.
I don’t quite follow. How can something be both hyperfeminine and androgynous?
When I contrast the current female fashion trends with theshort hair, severe makeup and shoulder pads that was standard 80s fashion, there is no way that I can conclude that today is the androgynous era.
Do you have any statistics that demonstrate that? Because to me all those women look very similar in terms of body fat and waist and hip measurements.
Sure, there were stick thin models in the 80s and 90s, just as there are today. And there a few more curvy swimsuit model types like Upton, Hurley and McPherson. But I see no evidence that either type has become more or less common.
