A few mens’ fashion/style things that differentiate the 90s from 00s and 10s:
Skinny jeans
The Man Bun
Scruffy beards, and hipster facial hair.
A few other relatively recent social trends driven by the internet.
Cosplay. This certainly existed before, but it’s vastly expanded in its popularity and reach.
Twitch.tv More people watch people playing video games than the NFL.
Artisanal everything.
Instagram/facebook/twitter sharing of every moment. You would never see multiple people at a restaurant all taking pictures of their meals in the 90s or 00s. It’s… fairly common now.
I think the biggest change culturally since the 1990’s, at least in TV and music, is acceptance of homosexuality. Remember what a big deal was made of the episode where Mariel Hemingway kissed Roseanne? And of course there was Ellen’s coming out episode. Today if a show has a gay character you’d probably only know it because you watched it, and sometimes only if regularly (e.g., Captain Holt on Brooklyn 99 or Alex Danvers on Supergirl).
If you ask me, it would be the 90s. It’s probably a nostalgia thing, since those were my teen years, but I miss the music, the tv shows, and I’d also LOVE to go back and watch Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr play in their prime once again.
Seriously? Someone mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was also the collapse of the Soviet Union. You cannot possibly tell me that wasn’t a huge deal? Much, much bigger than Reagan, or the Challenger explosion, as tragic as the latter was.
Major revolutions in the middle east? The rise of the personal computer? The AIDS epidemic?
The advent of the internet. That was major, and pretty much changed life as we know it. (Yes, I’m aware that technically it existed long before that). The end of the Cold War. The first WTC bombing, Waco, the cease fire in Northern Ireland?
The Columbine massacre? The end of Apartheid? Seriously, dude.
Yep, that was probably the biggest thing for me in the 90s. It’s a harder event to track, because it gradually crept into our lives, but I certainly remember the early 90s being different from the late 90s because of the growing ubiquity of the Internet, email, etc. While I mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall as being the biggest geopolitical event in my lifetime, the growth of the internet in the 90s (and onward, obviously) has been the biggest technological and social/interpersonal event in my lifetime, I think.
I don’t really follow fashion so I’m wading in out of my depth, but stuff I remember from the early 2000s that I don’t see anymore:
Really low slung trousers - I remember Britney and the Hilton sisters wearing pants that were barely keeping them from an indecent exposure charge
Fauxhawk
Denim with everything
Men’s highlights
Handkerchief tops
Emo
Massive oversize sunglasses
And I’m not sure what women WERE doing with their eyebrows, but they WEREN’T doing that blocky dark heavy permanent marker thing that they do now. Or the face highlight that makes you look vinyl.
More recent looks I don’t remember being around in the early 2000s include the hipster thing (that’s what we were calling the low slung trousers as opposed to current usage), or that hairstack/lumberjack thing that men are doing. For women, I feel like alternative fashion retro 50s pinup styling with heavy tattoos (rockabilly?) took off closer to the end of the first decade, or at the start of the second.
When was “manbun” coined?
IMO: I feel like we’ve fractured into more subcultures. It’s not that there isn’t anything distinct to the decades, it’s that there are many different ways to present yourself and a less ubiquitous mainstream.
Remember: In the 1960’s pants on women were unacceptable. There were public places that would not allow women in pants to enter (I am NOT kidding). Women in pants was considered unnatural and accused of being lesbians (I am still NOT kidding).
There were tales of women going into restaurants in pants and a long shirt, being refused entrance, going back into their cars and taking off the pants, and going back to the restaurant in whatever was left.
I heard a woman on a cell phone tell the listener “My in-laws would not come into the house because I was wearing slacks.” I muttered “What century are they living in?” and she said to the listener “That’s it exactly. The cashier just summed it up perfectly: What century are they living in?” I was so proud.
Yes, and the acceptance of gay people. Neil Patrick Harris was scared to come out until his publicist told a newspaper he was “not of that persuasion.” Whereupon he fired said publicist and came out in an interview with The Advocate. And what was the reaction? Nothing.
On a similar note, when Robert Guillaumne took over for Michael Crawford in the LA production of Phantom of the Opera, the theatre was worried about getting letters against the showing have an African-American Phantom and a white Christine. They got two.
Really? If I wanted to make a caricature of early-mid-90s fashion, that would be it. As one of the commentators says: “90s as fuck.” Flannel is still around, but I’m not sure most can pull off that torn jeans look unironically now. Sure, you may see people wear 90s fashion now, just like you’ll see 60s and 70s fashion, but that flannel and torn jeans look is sooooooo 90s, it almost looks like a parody of itself.
Yeah, remember waaaay back when the Guiness Book of World Records said that a woman trying to set the record for fastest marathon in a nurse’s uniform* couldn’t wear pants? That rule lasted all the way to … a few days ago.
Apparently this a thing you can get a world record for.
The thing that’s different after 2000 is the rise of the internet and the ability for everyone to stream their own entertainment. Previously, pop culture was consistent because we all watched pretty much the same TV shows and listened to the same songs on the radio. The corporate gatekeepers were able to create a consistent culture that moved slowly. But now, each of us is watching our own selections of videos from a variety of sources and listening to our own personal music choices from streaming libraries. It’s going to be much more difficult for a unified culture to form when we’re all creating our own version of the current pop culture.
I was in my teens in the 1960’s; rural New York State. Girls and women routinely wore pants at home, to do some kinds of work, at picnics, and so on. Slacks and jeans were routinely sold in women’s cuts – they’d have a side zipper, not a front fly. I’ve got a 1949 Sears catalog (which would have been distributed nationally) with several styles of slacks and also dungarees for women “for the peppy college girl!” So they certainly weren’t entirely unacceptable; though of course individual family standards might vary.
What wasn’t done was for women to wear pants for office work, or to the kind of place that required men to wear a jacket or tie. There were more such places than there are now.
Through the early 1960’s, my mother and I would put on skirts to go into town and do the grocery shopping. (And my father would put on a jacket and tie when going into town.) And almost all the way through the 60’s I had to wear skirts to school. By the late 60’s there had been a drastic shift, and many younger women (and some older ones) were wearing jeans routinely to do ordinary errands.
ETA: there were public places that wouldn’t allow women to enter at all. Some restaurants, clubs, etc. were men-only. And all the employment ads were classified – help wanted male, help wanted female; there might be a third section for jobs either gender would be hired for.
Of course you don’t see it. You’re in it. In time, the “personalities” of those decades will be quite apparent to you.
Of course, bear in mind those “personbalities” will be largely fiction and nonsense. The “distinguishable personality” of, say, the 1950s you claim to know about is a pop culture creation and a product of your own personal nostalgia and the weakness of your own memory, which do one that really does not accurately reflect what life was like for people living then.
One thing distinctive of about the late 90s was the Monday Night War between WCW and WWF(now WWE). WCW became popular with with advent of the NWO angle. And WWF with advent of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Professional wrestling hit its all-time peak of popularity among the mainstream. It seemed I couldn’t go out in public without seeing someone wearing either an NWO or “Austin 3:16” t shirt. So if you were going to 90s themed party wearing either of those would be appropriate.
Visible tattoos. No longer hidden on shoulders and backs, it’s now very common to see full sleeve tattoos and even neck tattoos on regular people. They’re not just for the back alley niche crowd anymore. Soon you’ll see them on hosts of kid’s TV shows.
YouTuber fame. Making your own content, bypassing traditional studio support, and still getting millions of views and sometimes millions of dollars. That aspect can’t last in this form, so it will be distinctly part of this decade I think. But it’s also such a huge variety of unusual niche content that is unfeasibly popular.
Social Media as a legitimate force. It’s not just communication of memes, it’s a source of news, and can make or break a career, or initiate a movement.
Bingeing TV shows. They’re still events, just in a new format.
Podcasts. The new radio. A source not just for entertainment, but it’s where the top comedians and character actors are coming from.
Fantasy TV series. They used to be barely 2% of a network’s output, but now it’s got to be at least 30% of some. The CW is almost entirely fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero right now. They may be comedy, drama, soap, or a combination of all three (as always) but they have to have some kind of demon, zombie, witch, or caped crusader in it somewhere.
You are right, I completely missed those. I knew there were some things I was missing. Consider this a lesson in perspective - it’s easier to see the events that are part of history than those that are a part of your life. And it’s easier to see trends after they’ve been processed through media perspectives.
To add to my history then:
1991 - Fall of the Berlin Wall/Soviet Union/End of the Cold war. I’m putting these together because the former was a very visible symbol of the latter, and the cold war ended when the Soviet Union did. I do remember wondering who was going to be the bad guy in all the future thriller/spy movies.
1993 - Waco Branch Davidian Siege
1993 - First WTC bombing.
1995 - Oklahoma City Bombing. Missing this may be a case of being too close to the event - my husband of the time worked in the Dallas Federal Building, and I worked a couple of blocks away from the Fort Worth Federal Building, and both of these had been targeted by the people who bombed the OKC Federal building (oddly, wiki lists a different motive for the bombing, but it happened two years to the day after the Branch Davidian Siege)
Early 90s - end of Apartheid
Mid 90s - End of “The Troubles” - Northern Ireland ceasefire.
Some of the other items, while they had cultural impact, were more of the slow burn - the rise of the use of personal computers, computer games, and the rise of the internet trickled into the public consciousness, rather than being a discrete event or a fairly short ranged event.
Wars in the middle east? Have been happening off and on for as long as I can remember.
So, what impact did these events have on pop culture? I note that the events I originally listed were from my childhood and teen years, plus those events I studied in American History from before my time. Guinastasia listed a number of events from her teenage years - a time period where I was getting away from pop culture. All I can observe from the added events is the reduction of worries about nuclear war and the switch from Russians as the bad guys to middle-easterners as the bad guys… a switch I’m not sure was an improvement
As one of the Board’s resident Old Guys, I see definite differences between the 2000s and 2010s.
2000s
Immediate post-9/11 trauma and USA! USA!
Primitive texting
When will Hillary run?
Democrats run new faces, Republicans keep running the same old white guys.
Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera bein’ nasty
2010s
We elected a black President! We got Bin Laden! So let’s elect Donald Trump!
Ipod, Ipad and I-everything else and 24/7 streaming everywhere
When will Hillary stop running?
Democrats keep running the same old white guys, Republicans ran a brand-new type of candidate
Taylor Swift being wholesome with a little attitude.
1990’s: Soon we’ll be living in the future we all imagined!
2000’s: The future is here!
2010’s: This doesn’t seem like the future. There should be hoverboards and replicants.
Here’s another fashion thing I thought of: untucked dress shirts. To me, I don’t really remember this being a very common thing before the 2000s. This NY Times style article claims 2004 was when it became big, but I didn’t dare go out with an untucked dress shirt until the mid-2010s, and I’m actually back to my tucked-in ways for the most part. Here’s an article from the Times from 2017 about the untucked shirts.
Also, since I mentioned David Cross before as looking quintessentially 90s in a stand-up act, I oddly came across this in my Youtube feed, and was looking at his outfit, and the only decade I can really place him in looking like that is the 2010s. Maybe, maybe the 2000s, but something about the whole look with the long but trimmed beard, the logo-less hat, the flannel, the dressy looking slacks, just screams a look that only looks right in this decade to me. It has elements of other eras, but not put together like that, and not “slick” looking like that.