The 60’s were so huge it’s hard to consider any other decade even close, but if I had to I’d say 80’s. Between the music and the hair it’s impossible to avoid knowing what decade you’re looking at or listening to.
But let’s take a poll!
Whoops.
Forgot to put the poll in.
[ul]
[li]60s[/li][li]70’s[/li][li]80’s[/li][li]90’s[/li][li]00’s[/li][/ul]
Mods?
I dunno, every decade has its “we’re in the ___'s” shorthand. For the 20’s, flappers and mobsters. 30’s, Okies in the Dust Bowl. 40’s, soldiers and women with shoulder pads and Rosie the Riveter. 50’s, poodle skirts, Donna Reed, toughs in leather jackets. 60’s, hippies. 70’s, disco. 80’s, power ties, neon, leg warmers. I’m not sure what the 90’s and 00’s are - too soon.
Of course a lot of those ignore the fact that, say, half of the 60’s were really still the 50’s.
Actually I couldn’t tell you a single characteristic of any decade after the '60s. And the '20s is the decade I can characterize best. Now please excuse me, I have to chase some kids off my lawn.
We cannot add a poll after the fact, but if you’d like to start a new thread, we can close this one.
90’s: grunge music, Jennifer Aniston hair, flannel
Fixed it-added poll.
Moved thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
I think pop culture exploded in the 80’s. Fashion changed every two minutes, special effects in the movies really hit their stride, and gimmicky songs with hooks were hitting #1 on the charts at an amazing rate.
That’s when movies started targeting teenagers. There was an explosion of teen comedies in the 80s. Teenagers already took over music and fashion in the 60s and 70s. The 80s are when they took over movies.
Backward caps and old computers for the 90s.
For the 00’s we’d need to know something in that decade that becomes obsolete in the next.
IMHO, the 60’s changed radically. The early 60’s were characterized by Camelot and the Beatles. By the late 60’s-Vietnam and protest music, and Haight Ashbury.
This is a key point. If you traveled back in time to the 60s, it wouldn’t look like a “Hey we’re in the 60s!” movie, because most people didn’t dress in a stereotypically 60s way. In fact, most people dressed almost exactly like they did in the 50s. You’d see men in suits and women in dresses, because most people don’t follow trends, they just buy regular clothes and wear them until they wear out.
So to identify “Hey we’re in the XXs!”, you have to isolate clothes and hairstyles that went obsolete after that. And so plain old regular clothing doesn’t identify the decade, instead the decade is identified by fringe fads that went out of fashion quickly. It’s because these fringe fads came and went so quickly and were embraced by so few that they are diagnostic for the era.
What about the 1940s, when the Big Band Era reallly came of age? Glenn Miller, The Andrews Sisters, the Dorsey brothers and Benny Goodman? No decade has sounded come close to sounding like it!
That’s what Mad Men really gets right - nobody looks really like an ad from whatever year, they just wear their clothes. The makeup changes the most, I’m sure because a new lipstick is much cheaper than a whole new wardrobe.
But even with “regular clothes”, the fashion changes. Take jeans, for example. In the 80s, men wore bleached, tight jeans. Then they became darker and baggier over the next 10 years. Now they’re skinny and slightly faded.
So I think if you time-traveled, you could in fact pick out which movie you were in.
Mea culpa! Sorry 'bout that, Stoid — and thanks, Czar.
Yeah, it changes. But take a look at this photo: http://www.alvinlee.de/page8hs1/Herb-at-Woodstock.jpg
It’s a crowd shot at Woodstock. And note that only a few are dressed in hippie gear. There are a few men with long hair, but most have short hair.
So if you were dropped in a crowd of people, you’d be able to identify the decade by looking at what people are wearing. But it’s not like everyone had on tight acid-washed jeans in the 80s, most people who wore jeans just wore normal jeans. But all it takes is a couple of people in acid-washed tight jeans to identify the decade, because they didn’t have them in the 70s, and people stopped wearing them in the 90s.
And by “people” we really mean young people, because older people don’t tend to change. Even when some of the kids were wearing tight acid washed jeans, the older people weren’t. Of course it’s also true that people buy what’s in stores, and if your old style or brand of pants isn’t sold anymore, you buy and wear whatever is available.
Here’s a video that gets at what I’m saying: http://filmmania.ru/video/view.php?video=R1MxGFncZgQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player&title=Cool+as+Ice%3A+“Drop+that+Zero”+(HD) Good old Vanilla Ice in full late 80s regalia, dissing the zero wearing uncool “normal” clothes. If you go back in time to the late 80s and see Vanilla Ice walking by, you have a diagnostic for the era. But if the zero or the girlfriend walk by, you’re gonna have to go by very subtle cues.
Absolutely the 60s (from JFK’s assassination through Watergate). Pop culture exploded the night the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, and the world was never the same. Any phenomena since the 60s happened gradually and with less identity.
I would say a couple subtle things (other than the photo quality) identify the photo as being from the 60s (or 70s), compared to a 90s Bonaroo concert:
-The distinct lack of short hair.
-Lack of men in baseball caps
-Most of the women have that long parted in the middle hippy style hair
-More yellows and browns than you would typically find in other decades
But in support of what you are saying, take this clip from the 80s film “Say Anything”. There is very little in the film to indicate that it takes place in 1989 Seattle (other than the fact that we are so familiar with the film and the actors). It could easily be 2009 Pennsylvania.
Should have included an age range for the replies. Because I’m willing to bet real imaginary money that your results are going to be skewed in favor of the decade immediately proceeding most people’s late adolescence - when they were old enough to notice trends, but not old enough to follow them. That stuff would look obviously dated in a particular time period to them, while the look of their own decade would feel very “normal”.
For this reason, born in the seventies and graduating high school in the nineties, I’d pick the 80’s as most identifiable. In the nineties, we wore “regular clothes” with a few subtle fads here and there. But my older brothers in the 80’s, man they wore some *weird *stuff! 