But just as the author cherrypicks examples to fit his theory, it’s possible to cherrypick in the opposite direction too.
Look at the leather jacket. Derided as something “hoods” and “greasers” wore in the 50s, by the 60s and 70s, it was a standard part of most men’s wardrobes. That has continued for 40 years.
I think it is an overstatement that nothing has changed in the last 20 years but I do agree that change seems to have slowed down. i think that is because of the ubiquitousness of video and the internet nothing ever has to go away. I can’t miss the great shows of the 90s because they are still on every day. The songs are still on the radio.
New culture just ends up building on what came before instead of replacing it so nothing seems so different.
I find it hard to put into words but sitcoms like Friends, Seinfeld, Mad About You - they all look extremely dated when I see them channel surfing.
There’s definitely been an appreciable change in fashion & hairstyles but, to the author’s credit, I can’t articulate these changes beyond a vague sense that people in sitcoms from the 90’s look funny.
If you are, you’re definitely stuck in 1992!
Regarding the article, British writer Simon Reynolds made many of the same points in his book Retromania, published last year.
Part of this, for me anyway, is how quickly widescreen TV has become the norm. Really old shows it doesn’t bother me but stuff from the decade before the changeover just looks too current to be in that little square (or worse, stretched to fit the full screen).
That’s how the world has changed. A 26" TV isn’t on the larger side any more.
There are fewer places outside of the workplace where you can feel comfortable “dressing up.”
Cherrypicking is one thing, but saying that the mood of the country has changed because of 9/11 seems to be addressing a completely different issue.
So? In 1974 halter tops, which show a lot more skin than tank tops, were pretty common in Urbana, Illinois at least. I’d say clothing is more conservative now than it was then.
In general, some things, like clothes, cycle and some things, like technology, progress steadily. It seems silly to assign an interval that means anything. My kids listened to the Beatles, but my mother liked Benny Goodman, and I still play the Carnegie Hall CD. Weird Al is Spike Jones with music videos. Frank Sinatra covered Something and said it was one of the best love songs ever, so I’m not sure he’d agree he was that different from John Lennon. The bobby-soxers reaction to him wasn’t that far off the reaction to the 1964 Beatles.
The internet changed everything, but so did television, the automobile, and the telephone. It might be accelerating a bit, but I wrote a (bad) story on the acceleration of technology for a high school magazine in 1968. Everything is new, but nothing is really new.
I think it’s not so much that the pace of culturual/societal change has slowed down, but that it has diversified, so that there are no longer obvious identifiers of a particular time, in the way that, for example, bell bottoms and huge collars are immediately identified with the early seventies. If you look back at media of that time, it’s surprising how uniform fashion was. Everybody was doing the flared trousers/big collar thing, even newsreaders.
I’d guess it is down to increasing prosperity, greater consumer choice, and increased levels of communication.
Indeed 
Is the argument just that “The way people dress hasn’t changed radically”?
One thing I don’t think anyone has touched on is how common place porn has become. Growing up in the 90s your options for porn was pretty much limited to adult bookstores and convienence stores. It still had that taboo with it too. Now something as simple as an internet search can yield countless porn sites as results simply because they share a word combination with what you were searching for and you hear stories about how people getting fired for emailing porn while at work. Or sitting down at a computer in a library and discovering that the previous user had been looking at whatever their particular kink is. Porn isn’t really something thats kept behind close doors anymore.
Crap. I have longish hair, wear blue jeans to the exclusion of all other trousers, and use the word “dude” more often than I probably notice. I also work alongside several kids in their early twenties. Now I’m gonna be paranoid that they’re all laughing at me behind my back. Totally serious here.
What age are these youths?
Back in the late '80s and thru the '90s, tho, the pants sagged because they were too big and they fell down. The trend now is skinny emo jeans that are too small in the waist for most guys to actually seat them properly on their hips; they can’t even get them up over their skinny asses.
Here’s my theory on why clothes and hairstyles and color schemes have remained mostly the same for the past 20-25 years: we already tried and discarded a bunch of styles that looked like shit and/or were a lot of work. What we’re left with is the stuff that doesn’t look completely ridiculous or crappy. Bell bottoms? Stupid. Pastels colors? Barf inducing. Huge wide collars? Dumb. Big padded shoulders? Dumber. Jeri-curl? Looks disgusting. Beehive hairdos? Look retarded and are difficult to maintain. Feathered hair? Looks kinda dumb on both guys and gals.
That’s why jeans and t-shirts, which was a fairly new combo in the '50s and sported often by people of lower-middle to lower class background (i.e. people without a lot of money for slacks and sportcoats) are still around and now pretty much the default dress for Americans: they don’t look ridiculous, are easy to match up color-wise, and are both reasonably devoid of stylistic elements that would clash.
Styles have settled into grooves that are easy to maintain, comfortable, and don’t look generally freakish. It’s like evolution in action for fashion.
They don’t look ridiculous because we’re used to them.
I have no doubt that, a hundred years in the future, people will think it ridiculously old-fashioned that we all went around in a uniform sea of blue jeans, broken only by the occasional khakis.
I disagree. We’re used to them because they didn’t get discarded; they stuck around (in part) because they didn’t look ridiculous when styles changed and in retrospect we realized that certain styles did look ridiculous. Parachute pants won’t be making a comeback, nor will earth shoes, but jeans and sneakers are still common.
Wouldn’t it be an terrible waste of music, though, if it was supposed to last for just one generation?
For the time being…
Hat wearing was de rigeur for how many decades among men before it stopped? Longer than jeans and sneakers have been fashionable.
People of a certain bent still wear ties, but it’s not because they’re objectively fashionable; they’re just the result of the caprice of history, some Croatians in a war off in the 1600s, and the fashion will turn on those too, someday. They’ll look so silly you would no more wear one than you’d wear a powdered wig.
You invoke “evolution”, but the thing about evolution is that it never stops.
Remember in the early 90s when the family would gather around the table for a game of Pictionary?
http://nesguide.com/games/anticipation/
Hardly anyone does that anymore with all of the entertainment options from our computers and cellphones.
Also, eyeglasses have become less common due to surgical options and their lenses have been reduced in size.