Except at 0:41, where Cusack is standing in a phone booth in the rain…
I forgot to comment on this part. Yeah, I agree, with a little attention to detail you can pretty quickly work out when this photo must have been taken. But my point was more that if you were the costume director for a movie set at Woodstock, you wouldn’t dress the extras like that, because it doesn’t scream “We’re at WOODSTOCK!”
If you are implying that fashion changed at an unprecedented rate in the '80s that is an interesting proposition & one I find hard to swallow, though I agree there was consistent change during that period.
Take a sample of men & women from 1963 and compare them with a similar sample of people from 1973. Note hair, clothing and makeup. I think that represents the fastest & most complete change ever seen. Even men aged 45 and up, traditionally resistant to trends, wore their hair longer with sideburns by 1973, with a few holdouts of course. I forget who it was, but some figure involved in the Watergate business in 1973 was ridiculed for wearing a crewcut which would’ve been perfectly normal five years earlier.
Speaking of Woodstock, I wish I could remember which commentator said this, but someone pointed out that a photo of the crowd at Woodstock reveals predominately slender & healthy-looking young people whereas in a photo of a music festival today you would see many fat people on the one hand and many hyper-muscular people on the other.
[quote=“Lemur866, post:17, topic:565514”]
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.
Just to clairfy something: To most adults of the '60s, most of the men in that picture WERE wearing long hair.
Here’s the picture of American scuzziness in 1968:
Yeah, it’s hard to remember nowadays, but the Beatles had shockingly long hair. No, not their later hippie long hair, but their Astrid Kirchherr styled Mop Tops. It’s hard to remember that not having a crew cut was somehow a political statement in the 60s.
I disagree with this a little. I was a teen in the '70s, and I certainly did wear tight, button-fly, bell-bottoms, coordinated vests for no reason, and poofed-out hair, as did my friends, and we were all guys. When I look at those pictures of us now, they scream The ‘70s so harrrd, and we looked ridiculous and ghey, but man, we knew we were smokin’. A lot of people dressed like the '70s stereotype in the '70s, at least everyone I knew, even my teachers.
On the other hand, I don’t know what the heck happened with the '80s. I don’t know anyone who dressed in what we would now term '80s fashion.
By some people’s standards, that guy is clean-cut.
Yes, that’s what I’m getting at. Many today would call that a fashionably smart look.
You might have a point about the 70s. In the 70s everyone just lost their mind, even the older folks. Suddenly everyone sprouted sideburns and bell bottoms and unbuttoned their shirts.
So give what I said earlier an asterisk for the 70s.
30 to 40 AD
Or maybe 1510 to 1520 BC
I’m born in 1958, graduated 1976, and the reason I thought of this was watching a Tina Marie (RIP) video from 1984 and I thought how the 80’s were just so fucking 80s! Even though the music was actually wide ranging, from punk at the start to Michael Jackson and Madonna, all that hideous New Wave Euro crap and hairbandheadbangingheavymetal… there’s a recognizable something about all of it that is just so…80’s. Add in shoulder pads and Hair Hair EveryWhair and to my mind it’s pretty much impossible to make any mistake when looking at an 80’s photo, listening to 80’s music, seeing 80’s films, looking at 80’s clothes… it SCREAMS HI! This is the 80’s!
On the other hand, the 6-'s, as noted, was actually a two-tier, two half thing: you had the straight arrow 60’s, whcih was jsut a more angular version of the 50’s, and the counterculture, which was very identifiable. But the counterculture slopped VERY heavily into the 70’s - “Hippes” didn’t really go away for the most part until the 70’s were almost over, when the Disco Glam Me era took over. But that was the beginning of the 80’s in many ways, and didn’t really last for 10 years, more like 4-5.
The 90’s were much less uniform. Yes, that was the rise of grunge rock/alternative, Seattle, and starbucks…but that didn’t really take over the culture the way the 80’s did, that was confined to young people, and just a segment at that. And it’s not like the music and fashion were all that iconic or recognizable - it was just relaxed and casual to my eyes, sort of like everyone said "Okay, we’ve done every wacky thing possible including clown pants (Can’t Touch This!) and variations on spacesuits (see the 80’s!) - now can we all just wear what we like?
And the “aughts” (will it ever have a widely accepted name?) were like a mashup of the 90’s and the 70’s, in that they were fundamentally casual and normal, with the addition of hiphuggers (a 70’s thing) taken to the ultimate. Hair was kind of everywhere, the trendiest thing being a return to the 70’s long and stick-straight.
And music is free - it’s all kinds of things. Rap and Hip Hop have been around for almost 30 years now, they don’t belong to any decade. The most definable sound would be that - god, I don’t know what to call it, really, but it’s definitely a “sound” I’ve noticed in music over the past 10 years, a segment of music. I’ll think of some bands that define the sound, but in any case it’s not pervastive, I just notice it’s a particular sound that I associate with the last 5-8 years.
That would be H. R. “Bob” Haldeman.
My vote is for the '50s- which isn’t on the poll- because, culturally, “The Fifites” lasted from about 1946 to the late 1960s in many, many places, and often the only way they’re distinguished in Pop Culture is that the Fifities are shown to be in Black & White for the most part.
It’s hard to pick just one. To me, the 70’s and 80’s are both equally valid choices. The 70’s, with messy hair styles for guys that became popular again in the 2000’s, the polyester suites, platform shoes, bell bottoms, brown, red, and yellow colors. The sideburns and Afro’s. I’ve heard it described as the time fashion forgot.
And then the 80’s. Parachute pants, leather jackets, big hair, mullets, muscle pants and shirts, pants and shirts with multiple colored stripes or spots.
The 60’s were probably more plain (I wasn’t there, I was born in '73) and someone on a radio show said that what we think of as the 60’s, with the hippy look really started out in the late 60’s and wasn’t popular until the early 70’s.
As for the 90’s, there was a backlash from the excessive and sometimes ridiculous look of the 80’s, so a lot of people went back to basic looks. Normal (not faded or shredded) jeans and plain T-shirts for example. The 2000’s seemed fairly low-key too.
Edit: I was only focusing on fashion. As for music, it’s all pretty easy to determine (for the most part), and television and movies too, which era they came from, but it’s the clothing and hair styles I think of most when I think of the different time periods.
The other point to ‘the 50s’ is that after WWII, everyone had new stuff. Especially cars, because all the pre-war cars were pretty darn worn out. So the 50s were fairly darn identifiable.
Men had “long” hair before the Beatles, but it was slicked back with grease and/or buried under hats.
I was around in the 1960’s. Believe me, it’s the 1960’s.
I wasn’t around during the 60’s but no doubt it had the biggest influence in more ways that one.
I was in my 20’s during the 90’s and really the only thing it did was raise the price of flannel and dock martins and got rid of that horrible 80’s cock rock infesting the airwaves.
Thanks Nirvana.