You actually missed something (not a lot.) In 1950s most men wore hats. When JFK didn’t wear one to his inauguration, hats started to vanish.
I think many trends do persist longer, and it’s because they’re each less pervasive. That also makes it harder for the casual observer to notice when they come in or out of style.
Consider first names. I’m sure we can all think of several that are very much associated with a certain age group–Karen, Linda, Mary, and Susan are very Boomer-ish, while their daughters Tiffany, Jennifer, and Stephanie probably all owned a crimper. But some names never quite got that popular and so never quite went out of style. I don’t know that any currently popular baby names are as common as these were in their heyday.
Low-rise pants dominated the fashion scene for almost two decades beginning in the '90s. Now, though, there isn’t a single waistline that everyone’s wearing. The hairstyle in that image of the woman in the black tank top upthread became popular in the late '00s and remains so, but it’s never been as ubiquitous as '80s big hair was. Likewise, her simple, snug-fitting attire was never the look everyone was going for, and so it wouldn’t look out of place today, even as boxier clothes have come into fashion. People don’t get sick of things as quickly when they don’t see them as much.
ETA: One thing I do think is changing rapidly is slang. I could probably pinpoint, say, a Jezebel article within about a 3-year span even if you blacked out the names of the celebrities it was about and other pertinent details, and just left a string of “YOLOs” and "I can’t even"s.
I wonder whether it is not that culture has stagnated, but rather that the half-century from 1950-2000 was exceptional in the speed of change. AFAIK culture usually develops at a much slower pace (which was remarked above also). Although technological changes may have contributed to rapid change, arguably it is infeasible to keep that up and therefore has now returned to a more normal, leisurely pace.
Similarly one might argue that ‘high culture’ had the frenetic development phase a half century earlier and ran out of speed precisely when pop culture took over. There have been similar periods and locations of rapid cultural development (renaissance Italy, classical Greece), but these also end after several decades.
In other words, we should not hold the 1950-2000s as a standard for anything.
Conversely it could be argued that every period believes that it is going through a period of rapid change because they stand so close to it, while later generations think it is all the same. I’m not sure whether most people can really appreciate the vast difference between the music of Haydn and Schumann, anymore than they can between the different periods of Chinese ceramics.
Probably because they are all still babies or young kids right now 
. Olivia, Emma, Ava have been top of the female name baby charts for quite a few years (Emma for instance has been in the top 3 of female baby names in the US since 2003). In about 10-20 years you’ll probably see a ton of them around.
I think this is the absolute key. When one is young and interested in the fashionable trends everything looks new and different and of course early 70s fashion looks WAAAY different than late 70s fashion, but at some point that person stopped caring about fashion and now… well nothing has really changed since then.
Think of the enormous differences between the mid-1890s and 1921. Quite a bit larger than the mid-1990s and 2021.
In pop culture?!? Films and recorded music were still in their infancy. I have to imagine that novels and other printed media, vaudeville, and sheet music remained prominent all through that era.
But that also gets back to my point. In that, if we look at young people today (and that’s normally where we need to look for fashion trends) we can’t say that hats are out either.
Just thinking of the men, fashion baseball caps, beanies, flat caps and trilbys are pretty popular. So we can’t even say that hatless is the current “look”.
I agree with the premise that this is primarily age-dependent. Every pop-culture touchstone since the late ’90s is a blur to me. I can pinpoint TV shows, movies, music, and fashion trends almost to the year, from the early 20th century till ~ the start of the 21st century. After that, it all seems the same. My daughters, however, can pinpoint the touchstones almost to the year since they were born to present day.
Alas, getting old simply isn’t cool (and I suppose the word, “cool” is no longer the bee’s knees anymore either).
Excellent analysis. This sounds a lot closer to explaining things. Conformity to the standard of the day was more widespread back then. When someone didn’t conform, like the hippies of the late 60s, the bell bottoms from the disco era, and so on, the non-conformists tended to not conform in the same way rather than each person doing their own thing.
If you look at pictures of the late 40’s, any crowd of men that isn’t on a beach is going to have over 50%-75% of those men wearing brimmed hats. Today, I’d bet you don’t get 5% of men wearing hats, and 90% of those hat wearers are baseball caps. Wearing a hat was how you looked like a professional man.
The irony is that my parents generation (the Boomers) probably associate those names with old ladies. My grandmother had aunts with those kind of names. Because they were of the generation born in the late 1800s, I never knew them, even as old ladies, and so I don’t have those same associations with those names. Instead names like Mildred, Gertrude, Maude, and Pearl are the sorts of names I associate with an old lady.
As a music fan born in '73, I have an odd impression of pop culture progressing kind of slowly through the ages, then there’s an explosion in '55 or so of rock and roll, and then that’s popular youth culture until The Beatles show up and kick it up a notch. I often think of the slogan for the movie American Graffiti: “Where were you in '62?” A whole eleven years previous. That movie’s soundtrack is all what we’d ascribe to “50’s music” though it’s set two years into Kennedy’s administration. But considering how important the music is to that movie (Lucas wrote ideal soundtrack selections into the script, if memory serves), he picked a perfect year in which to set it, considering how seismic the change coming down the road was. (I loved when Dave Barry wrote of that period, saying “we could feel the first light breezes of what would become Hurricane Beatle.”)
Jump forward, I’m growing up in the 80s, and racing home every day from school in 1984 to watch Video Hits on CBC. Every Friday there would be requests and a “flashback video.” Flashing back to the halcyon early days of music video of 1982? At the time, I bought it. Two years ago may as well be a hundred years ago to an eleven years old. But even now, you can watch vids from each year on YouTube and notice the aesthetic differences, by and large. The 80s moved at warp speed.
Nowadays, I think, well eleven years ago, I might not have had an iPhone yet, but we already had MCU movies and hi-speed internet at home. But I’m an old fart now, who dutifully buys every new Paul Weller and Nick Cave album when it comes out, but can’t be arsed to listen to the radio any more. So I’m not the best cultural critic by any stretch.
Pop culture didn’t stagnate in the 1990s; it just returned to balance after an abnormal acceleration during the previous four decades. Looked at over a period of more than half a century, pace of pop culture change from 1990 to the present is probably the norm. The 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s experienced the outsized influence of a single generation. There were just too many teens in the 1950s for the culture (and marketers) to ignore. Young adults were so numerous in the 1960s and 1970s that it was easier for society to co-opt that counterculture than to resist it. Having benefited from their culture being pandered to, that generation was more tolerant of changes to the culture brought in by their own children in the 1980s. By the 1990s Baby Boomers finally started to tire of all this change and became culturally reactionary as people fifty and older tend to be. In a way, it is the most populous generation that has culturally stagnated.
Here is Roger Ebert’s take on American Graffiti. It’s filled with visions of nostalgia, “a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent”
It was set 11 years prior. Is it even imaginable that a filmmaker could craft a ‘period piece’ set in 2010 or 2005, and have anyone actually recognize it, or feel nostalgic about it?
I’d happily take that bet. It’s going to depend on where we are of course but I think it’s going to be substantially more than your estimate in most locations.
I mean, think about it. Hipsters? Yes strongly associated with wearing beanies, fedoras etc.
Rural? Yep, various hats for warmth and utility. Urban? Yep, fashion baseball caps and once again beanies.
It’s a minority I’d say, but much more like 25-30% IMO.
Sure, the formality has changed and virtually all modern styles of hat are informal. That’s not really relevant to the point though.
So I was looking at movies from 2010 and one which I noticed that focused on young folks and their look was Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (a fantastic movie). It looks dated from the jump (and not just because it was when Michael Cera was a big deal)… for one the male hairstyles are all… poofier. And it was the middle of the ironic t-shirt craze. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s main outfit is also kind of interesting in a 2000s sort of way. And a lot of people are wearing the hoodie under jacket style (which is also very apparent in Big Bang Theory).
And there is a lot of arm sweatbands going on… which match the ironic t-shirts.
And now that I think about it, Juno has a similar aesthetic going on.
Since the thread is about cultural stagnation since the mid-1990s and Ebert’s review specifically mentioned Nov 22, 1963, I’d say that something similar absolutely is imaginable.
Consider a hypothetical movie made in 2010 set 11 years prior. And absolutely people might have felt nostalgic for the ‘innocent’ pre-9/11 days, which similar to the Kennedy assassination, defined a generation. There was absolutely a shift in tone in TV, movies, books, etc after 9/11. Not to mention technology (plenty of people did not even have a cellphone, much less a smartphone, in 1999 and going online still meant AOL for the ones who did that kind of thing - counting ‘online’ minutes and tying up the landline phone at the same time).
And lest we forget, there are a lot of TV shows and movies set in or referencing the '90s now - Captain Marvel, that Tonya Harding bio-pic, Derry Girls, Little Fires Everywhere, Fresh Off the Boat. Things are clearly ‘different’ enough that they feel like they’re referencing a different era. And no surprise - the creators involved grew up in that era and have come into their own now, so the period is open to nostalgia. It’s not going to spark as much nostalgia for people who were already grown up by then.
OK Boomer.
There have been cultural platforms that have come and gone since the late ‘90s that all had more reach than Woodstock and all the other hippie circlejerks combined. There are Korean bands that sold more albums in that period than the Beatles and Stones combined in all of the 60s and 70s.
TV has become something completely different.
Internet has completely changed how we consume entertainment and culture.
But sure, let’s discuss hats
Huh? Who buys albums anymore, let alone young folks who listen to K-Pop?
Mid 90s listeners to the Wannabe by the Spice girls or Ice Cube’s Today was a good day would consider Lorde’s Royals or Redbone by Childish Gambino pretty massive changes in the sonic landscape.
Limiting things a bit more to changes from 2010 to today:
- Prevalence and style of beards
- Spiky hair replaced by undercuts
- Younger guys with a more dapper look with more fitted clothes, tidier hair, hats.
- General retro 90’s trend has appeared - esp glasses, high waited jeans, skateboards and scooters as a method of getting places
- Large woolen pea-coats, Ugg boots
- New releases of rock music have taken a huge dive in prominence.
- A big general merger of Pop, Dance and Hip-Hop into slick, downtempo minimalist songs with
prominent vocals. - Tramp stamp and bicep ring tattoos throughly out of fashion, larger calf and lower arm pieces are more common