Is culture/fashion in a permanent holding pattern?

I was born in 1986, so I grew up through the 90's. A decade which had a distinct look and feel to it, through fashion and interior decor and a certain ethos in the music. Of course I also grew up watching stuff from the past, obviously you kinda just watched what was on TV back then, and you could tell pretty quickly approximately what era something was from just by how people were dressed, not to mention the music. 50s/60s/70s/80s period pieces were everywhere and quickly identifiable as such.

I think the 00's had its own vibe too - Malcolm in the Middle feels very authentic in how people actually dressed back then and what their houses looked like (at least, if you were lower-middle class). Alt-rock, emo, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, dance punk, Adult Swim-type humor, South Park and Family Guy...all that stuff was very pervasive. Obviously the internet was around but it was its own certain zone of humor. Things that went viral were spoken of as being "from the internet", for instance.

What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far. Certainly there are folks born in 2006 who may one day attend a "10s night" at a bar, but what exactly are the signifiers of that decade? Black Eyed Peas and LMFAO? "Blurred Lines"? It feels like we've entered an era where pop culture has truly started to eat itself, everything is a reference to something else, not that the 90's were innocent of this sort of thing but at least there was this sense that things were getting combined or recontextualized in new ways, now (as a big ILX thread says) it feels like so much of pop culture is just empty fan service, where "80's" isn't an influence but rather the entire exercise. It's been discussed many times over here but there seems to be so little new these days. What will people remember from this decade? Is there an actual "fashion" of the 20's that I'm not seeing? To me people dress the same as they did 20 years ago. Is there some graphic design trend I'm missing that's showing up on album covers that people will look back on and say, "that's so 20's"?

Is there an explanation for this? Did the limitations of technology dictate the look and style of things to a far larger degree than we may think? Did the internet kill the monoculture from which things like this would spring forth? Am I just getting old and not noticing the things happening right under my nose?

I read a book within the past few months that spent many pages making the same point...think it might have been Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses; that it's hard to look at a photo from the '90s forward and ID the decade, whereas that's pretty easy from the '20s through the '80s.

idk photo filters are a pretty specific 2020s aesthetic?

The album covers trend would probably be 'wordless'/just a striking image.

W. David Marx's Status and Culture gets into this.

(xxpost) He meant more the content of the photos--hair, the way people dressed, etc.

see I would argue that filters are in fact fashion, and part of the "way people dress"!

see also: the duck lip look

Cursed AI images are probably the mark of the '20s. Like there will be people in 2050 putting pictures of people with extra fingers on their album covers.

Not at home right now, but later tonight will try to find a quote from the book relevant to this thread.

https://snkrdunk.com/en/magazine/2024/06/21/why-so-many-people-are-wearing-crocs-now/

xxp like Eno says, the failings of today's technology becomes the aesthetic of the future

As far as general culture goes, young people in the 2020s seem waaaaaaaaaaay more politically aware than they were in the 90s. That may just be the ones I see though.

Yeah but this is all online stuff, "aesthetics" are a big thing (cottagecore etc)- but if you were to look at a photo or tv show from 20 years ago, there'd be very little you coild point to and say "Yes that is definitely 2005" unless they were wearing, I dunno, shutter shades and emo hair which only a handful of people did. It's not the same as even when I was at school in the eighties and nineties and my friends and I would giggle at 70s fashion with the bellbottoms and big hairstyles from only about 10 years before

Filters etc aren't that different from the quality of photos, like that saturated look you got from Polaroids back in the day. It's definitely an indicator of the time, but it's more an indicator of tech than a conscious aesthetic choice

xpost I dunno, the broccoli hairdos are probably not going to age well.

We must have had a thread or two to this effect ten or fifteen years ago, so maybe the answer is yes. Not to attack the thread.

I stand by my Crocs link ;)

specifically I'm thinking about The Office which is about as old now as Cheers was when I was watching re-runs of that - Cheers very much felt "of another era" in a way The Office doesn't - people still look and dress like that

I've been working at colleges for 20 years and I don't see much difference in the way the students dress over that time. If anything it's just more casual, or people dress like they're on the way to gym.

didn't help that all of the 32 year olds on Cheers looked 60

Just pulled the W. David Marx book off the shelf. He says that cultural stasis has to do with the reduced status value of contemporary cultural output, as the internet and global supply chains have reduced barriers to information and acquisition.

A few excerpts:

The inherent high speed of the internet ... disrupts traditional fashion cycles. Elite groups need time to be the sole adopters of an innovation for it to gain cachet. For most of the twentieth century, slow fashion cycles meant high-status innovations could elude media discovery for at least a few months, if not years. Early adopters took a while to figure out how to emulate, and manufacturers needed time to make copies for mass consumption. Fashion relied on social friction to slow down the diffusion process, which allowed elites to look sincere and authentic in adoption -- a gradual lifestyle upgrade rather than a flashy attempt at status distinction. This entire system is upturned by light-speed information flows on the internet.

In the twentieth century the use of culture in status struggles resulted in a constant stream of new artifacts, styles, and sensibilities -- all injected with cachet, which allowed them to influence mass culture. On the internet, there are more things, but fewer arrive with clear and stable status value. At an unconscious level, this affects our judgments of intrinsic quality: films, songs, and books without status value just aren't as rewarding as their predecessors. As part of our desire for status, we chase status value. And so if niche culture lacks status value, many have fled the long tail to return to the head.

To be very clear, this doom and gloom is not about the artistic quality of internet-era content. We live in a paradise of options, and the diminished power of gatekeepers has allowed more voices to flourish. The question is simply whether internet content can fulfill our basic human needs for status distinction. Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused. When a trend evaporates as a cultural fad, there may not be enough collective memory for it take on historical value, either.

In hindsight, retromania appears to have been a response to the plummeting cachet of contemporary culture. Between virality, a destruction of barriers to information and access, the celebration of simple nouveau riche aesthetics, and a rejection of taste, inventions haven't taken on as much status value as in the past. Meanwhile, we feel more pressure to be 'authentic,' which raises the bar for switching to new things. Before we consider adoption, new styles must prove they aren't fads -- and they're mostly fads. With contemporary status value on the wane, historical value rises to the fore. The reliable past is more useful for crafting personas than an ephemeral present.

I think it takes time to see what is outdated and emblematic about a past decade. I don't think anyone in the 1990s would have used La Croix packaging as a prime design example from that decade.

I've noted before that it's kinda weird that so many pop stars have been around for so long-- Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Drake--all on the charts now--debuted in the 00s. Plus so many 2010s artists like Kendrick, the Weeknd, Post Malone, Selena Gomez. Feels like there's not a lot of room for new breakthroughs.

Yeah, stuff crystallizes and is then considered to represent the era from a distance, with neither the view from the present nor from far away entirely accurate, probably. Also seems that the far away view of the past has some inherent societal need for everyone to agree on a few things. I guess cos easier than everyone actually forming an individual memory which would prevent collective discussion.

xpost

Cursed AI images are probably the mark of the '20s. Like there will be people in 2050 putting pictures of people with extra fingers on their album covers.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Tuesday, 1 April 2025 bookmarkflaglink

By 2050 we'll have an extra finger.

Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused.

It's hard for me to see this as a very negative effect in that it's hard to imagine actual harm to anyone arising from there being fewer fashion trends.

I'm not quite sure about those W. David Marx extracts: he seems to see all culture through the lens of "basic human needs for status distinction" and "status value". That feels a bit reductive and too simplistic.

Thanks for the reminder to read Status and Culture. Since it's an ebook on my laptop I kinda forgot about it.

It does seem like AI is only going to continue reinforcing the dominance of big legacy monoculture IP, everything being regurgitated endlessly.

the thing is AI can only barf out things from the past, if it's going to continue to produce an increasingly higher and higher percentage of content then culture can't really "evolve" beyond past trends

what about k-pop?

Many will be jubilant at this development, but reduced status value has negative downstream effects. Elites are less likely to adopt as many cultural innovations, which means fewer fashion trends to be diffused.

This line does seem particularly ridiculous... It's like a mainstream economist, who is used to taking about benefits of the diffusion of innovation in the economy from new technologies and new products, suddenly moving onto covering fashion without thinking about what he is saying.

It was the Kurt Andersen book--came to mind as soon as I read the thread's original post. Was able to find a preview page online. "A fixed backward gaze"...

https://i.postimg.cc/K8Kb5J7p/kurt-1.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/8zqSXMtp/kurt-2.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/hj0RGwgv/kurt-3.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/brCXxtZj/kurt-4.jpg

Sorry if that's too large, but it won't be readable otherwise.

maybe Philip K. Dick was right and we are still living in the Roman Empire

k-pop feels like if the US had sent a Voyager-type probe to another continent in 1998 and filled it with the current hit records and then 20 years later we received an answer probe back filled with BTS and BLACKPINK songs

there's some great new pop music like that, stuff heavily influenced by say Seal and "Steal My Sunshine" and the brief era when Big Beat was cool, it doesn't feel nostalgic so much as it feels like a glimpse into an alternate present where a different set of trends carried on and were built upon

I think the 00's had its own vibe too...What I struggle with, however, is the "look" of the 10s or the 20s so far.

No surprise--clearly related to age. Kurt Andersen is 70, I'm 63; frogs turns 49 sometime this year. I'm good through the '90s at differentiating; the '00s are indistinguishable for me from the '10s or '20s.

I'm exactly the same with music and film; everything this century blurs together, everything before I have a strong sense of each decade.

In search of a calculator...frogs turns 39 this year.

00s for me are freak folk, CDr releases, New Weird America, etc, but I can't really think of specific fashion, just a mishmash of the Arthur magazine/Eclipse Records catalog/Aquarius aesthetic I guess

Fashion def doesn't look like the '10s or '00s to me, but it feels more like anything goes now, there are trends but it's also like 'pick your era' and it works.

(I'm not super fashionable but I work with a lot of younger people)

xp

It's really had to see how much this is a real problem, because people have been complaining about it for so long. I take it the passage from W. David Marx (thanks for that! must investigate) is responding to Simon Reynolds. In an interesting roundtable about Retromania, Carl Wilson says,

But even just to deal with the music listener’s experience, it’s always been the case that if you look closely enough at any “new” music you can identify the constituent parts. And the older you are, the more prone you are to do so. Simon underestimates how all the skill and knowledge he’s built up (and possibly the aging brain’s decreasing circuits for novelty) might cause him to pick music apart almost involuntarily, and how that makes less and less sound new. No doubt there were people in the early 1970s who heard the Stooges and said, “Well, that’s just the Velvet Underground plus a little Doors and Eddie Cochran,” or what have you? But for punk that band was foundational.

As far as general culture goes, young people in the 2020s seem waaaaaaaaaaay more politically aware than they were in the 90s. That may just be the ones I see though.

i definitely see a 'look' among younger people fwiw. gap ad neutral colors, baggy fits (skinny jeans are way way out), crew socks, broccoli hair, mom jeans. i hate it and that's ok.

Thrifting has reached a pinnacle I haven’t seen in my lifetime - I work w a lot of young ppl too (as coworkers and students) and the cache of secondhand clothing surpasses almost anything new afaict. It helps that baggy fit is in bc nothing is going to fit perfectly from the thrift anyway (at least rarely)
DIY clothing too — this has always been cool imo but it’s more widely recognized as such currently afaict.

The popularity of sustainable clothing choices also ensures that old things will be put together in new ways.

Incidentally I’ve also seen two male students get perms! You thought that dies in the 80s and you were wrong!

Oops *died

!!

mullets are hip again too, I have observed this at egg punk shows

also?
one word: mustaches

i have never in my life -- not even in the actual 70s/80s -- seen so many mustaches on young people

idk... Political thinking seems to be exhausted, over-mined, and almost at a dead end - rather than in a holding pattern.

I would say that the political holding pattern or dead end predates the cultural internet thing, too - I'd say since the 90's? Perhaps earlier.

I don't know, the '90s didn't feel ideologically stultified. The last big ideas of the century — neoliberalism, basically — were still playing out and still proffering at least a vision (a false one, obviously) of shared global prosperity in the bold new dawn of the post-Cold War era. It also prompted the anti-globalization protest movement on the left, which felt like a new truly global movement itself. (I'm not saying that politics wasn't at something of a dead end, as subsequent decades would suggest. But that's not how I experienced it in the moment, anyway.)

But I'm not trying to derail the thread into political discussion so much as wonder about the political ramifications of the cultural trends being discussed here. New ideas have to come from somewhere, and art, philosophy and science have always been their most natural seedbed. Science has obviously kept on keeping on, although the current "AI for everything" push feels kind of sour — generative AI at least is inherently backward-looking, because it can only build with things that have come before. (I'm not sure that contemporary philosophy is contributing much to the cultural conversation either, in a way it absolutely did at least through the popularization of postmodernism. But maybe having major movements named with the prefix "post" was a signal of stultification to come.)

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this theory, but trans rights and massive shifts in the culture of gender need to be accounted for, including of course the current backlash

Will add that neoliberalism can be blamed for the some of the lacks you're identifying: a lack of new movements in philosophy, for example, can plausibly be attributed to the neoliberalization of the university

Yeah. I mean, I think neoliberalism itself sort of envisioned itself as an end state, "the end of history" etc. And definitely LGBTQ rights broadly continued as forward motion into the 20-teens. But I'd argue that was a continuation of the rights revolution put in motion in the 1960s that played out across the next 50 years. The backlash was growing the whole time. Trans rights turned out to be kind of the high water mark of that wave — and as such almost inevitably the first to feel the impact when the tide changed.

It should be noted that there *are* new political ideas - UBI probably the most widely discussed one in recent decades - but they do not penetrate in a way that makes them transcend the context of stagnation.

The first thing that came to mind are the issues discussed in this 2021 op-ed about how difficult it's become to amend the U.S. constitution: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/opinion/amend-constitution.html.

in our current moment i'm grateful for that, though the supreme court seems to just do what it likes anyway

The childishness of "end of history" talk seemed to me to be paradoxically both naive and self-serving - a willed childishness about how things work in the world, how power works. as if everyone was going to just be okay with the current inequalities! It shows you how moronic at heart these people were (and are), how totally blinded by their own success they were. People will tell themselves any old horseshit as long as it props up whatever system is yielding an uninterrupted hose of privilege into their veins.

Yup. And maybe part of what we're seeing now culturally is the aftereffects of that triumphalism, exacerbated by the internet and social media. The absorption of superficial postmodernism into '90s culture, all the meta referentialism and remixing of genres, tropes and styles of the entire postwar era (and earlier too, e.g. steampunk) wasn't out of line with the idea that we'd reached some kind of terminus and all we had left to do was play with the past. The internet and especially social media has tended to prioritize the individual and the personal over the communal and the political, whatever its value in providing ways for people to connect. The cultural ground that Trump arrived onto had already been significantly individualized and atomized, which is prime territory for messages of us-vs-them or you-vs-the world.

we need a thread to talk about new processor efficiency, cores, multithreading etc

I’ve got nothing truly deep on this topic, but I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and getting rid of things, inspired by my parents doing the same as they’re getting ready to move. The number of cultural artifacts, pictures and keepsakes from different eras make me think things really have changed, even over the course of every 3 - 5 years!

I think the music, art, fashion, etc. that persists is a red herring. It’s what appears and falls out that are the real markers

pictureofreddotsonplane.jpg

I think there's been a ton of development in political thought in the 21st century. A lot of new types of fascism, several kinds of religios-political extremisms, etc. And also, identity politics, afro pessimism, intersectionality, etc. Plus Thomas Piketty, 'competitive authoritarianism'. Quite a lot. Marxist thought is struggling, yeah, but a lot of other ideologies has developed quite a bit.

It just hit me the other day that for obvious reasons there will never be a dumb gimmicky Rhino box set for the 00's. If there were, what would it be called? Nb the 80's box was called Totally and the 90's box Whatever (the 70's box was Have A Nice Decade, because it was a rejig of the Have A Nice Day series).

Is "it's lit" more 00's or 10's?

10s iirc

I looked at a couple of dumb listicles and most of the examples seemed to originate in 90s rap — crunk, bling, da bomb, word, booyah — though I might be misremembering, maybe some of those are 00s? Baller and cray I do think are 00s, but I'm not sure they have the right level of mass cultural cachet. "Hater" might be the best example I saw of a new term that definitely got mass take-up, though obvs not gonna work for this.

Apart from stealing from rap/AAVE, there's also internet/texting slang. I don't know if anyone would want a boxed set called LULZ or w/e

I have regretfully concluded that "Wazzzup" might be your best option, but then again I am kind of an 00s hater

Budweiser frogs were late '90s

2000s Rhino box would be called "OMG LOL."

Apart from stealing from rap/AAVE, there's also internet/texting slang. I don't know if anyone would want a boxed set called LULZ or w/e

Actually you're right, it would totally be "OMG: The Big Box Of 00's culture".

Then for the '10's they'd just put the poop emoji.

xpost!

BRB: A Collection Of Gems From The 00's could be the Nuggets set.

Budweiser frogs were late '90s

― jaymc, Sunday, November 2, 2025 8:45 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago)

That's not where whasssup comes from — no frogs involved, just a bunch of dudes. Apparently the first ad is from December 20, 1999, so I guess technically you are correct :)

OMG LOL is a good call though

Lol was around in the 90s too

Sure, people also definitely said "whatever" before the 90s, etc. On further reflection, Daniel's OMG (by itself) probably fits the spirit of the 80s and 90s titles best

That's not where whasssup comes from — no frogs involved, just a bunch of dudes.

oh yeah, duh. i was conflating the two.

bud-weiss-errrr

it will have those kanye west sunglasses on the cover

…thumb slipped and I hit enter before I intended to. Even stuff like “clean girl/minimalism” aesthetic is very misleading because it’s built on so much money. The influencers pushing “clean girl” have lip fillers, buccal fat removed, veneers, highly expensive skincare regimes and there’s a real shift towards spending a TON of money on the facial interventions so you can always look a certain way at all times. You wake up and your eyes are wide open from your mini brow lift, your lips are always plump, your skin is perfectly tight because you paid someone to make it that way - it’s kind of inhuman. Never look tired, never look sad, never look anything except blank. It’s all so samey - all these women have huge pillowy lips and fox eye lifts and use the same filters. Jessica deFino covers this all on her substack, here’s a better way of explaining it from a recent post:

https://jessicadefino.substack.com/p/facial-harmonization-trend🕸

From a separate post by the same author:
_Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant Saran Wrap when she preached about preservation! — because exfoliating is easier than engaging in political action._

And I mean, yeah. It’s not great out there!

Kat Tenbarge wrote a good piece on the soon to be discontinued Teen Vogue about how the minimalist/clean beauty aesthetic has been a pipeline to fascism for girls and women per a couple of deeply researched examples:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/womanosphere-teen-girls-misinformation

This essay seems relevant to the thread. He marshals a lot of data to argue that Americans are less weird and less deviant as a whole than we used to be. I think he makes a lot of interesting points, but one thing he omits is the degree to which the cultural deviance of earlier generations has been so completely absorbed by the mainstream and commodified by capitalism. In a lot of ways it’s much harder to be weird in 2025 than it was in even 1985, never mind 1925.

https://open.substack.com/pub/experimentalhistory/p/the-decline-of-deviance?r=1yhtw&utm_medium=ios

Not completely sure about the theme of the conclusion: Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology.

If anything, I feel the main feeling in the background is one of extreme precariousness and insecurity: a lot of people being one or two pay checks away from destitution, and constantly aware of seemingly inevitable increasing effects of climate change etc. One of my older family friends here in the UK reminisces that in the 60s you could walk out of a job on a Friday and pick up another job on the Monday (or whenever you felt like resuming work ), and that led to a very different approach to life.

I'd term it our 'super-precarious environments'.

Yeah I’m less persuaded by his explanations than his diagnosis.

Tho he is also right that the absolute precarious of life in the U.S. has declined considerably in the past century. Average lifespans are up a lot, a lot of things that used to kill a lot of people don’t any more. I think that’s what he means by safe.

Immediately pre-internet and dawn-of-internet subcultures are fascinating to me.

(I don't have any special insight here except young adulthood had an on-the-cusp aspect to it. I went to college with a typewriter, and as I was leaving, incoming freshmen had computers.)

Some phenomena will have experienced "both" speeds of transmission.

Church of the Subgenius is an example for me because in 1990, say, you would have had to be very precisely placed and/or a voracious pursuer of oddness to hear of it. In 2000 it would be commonplace for things like that to percolate virally at meme speed.

Ditto urban legends, fax lore, campfire stories. There is now actual data on how fast and how far such a thing can travel, and I am sure there's a grad school paper or two in there. The speed with which a photograph of a dress (or whatever) becomes saturated does mean that oddness or deviance gets banal quickly.

It is a good and interesting essay. I think he’s very good at illustrating homogenisation, but I’m not quite sure about the concept of ‘cultural deviance’.

In 1987 (my sophomore year) people at my college threw a Church of the Subgenius Thanksgiving dinner. Me and future queer theorist José Esteban Munoz managed to dip before the orgy started…

Just for the historical record, the moment a renowned cultural deviant posted here on ILX:

Slap the cuffs on our Julie? My dear Mark S., you perceive but the vulgar fraction. Spanking is a classic dud, but decadence always a higher calling. Now I hit submit to post. It's all in the language, dog. -- Mick Farren
― Mick Farren, Friday, July 27, 2001 12:00 AM

I’m not quite sure about the concept of ‘cultural deviance’.

Definitely a slippery idea. As the example of Church of the Subgenius illustrates nicely. I first encountered CoS while working at an alt-weekly in the ‘90s, courtesy of our office IT guy/juggler/all-purpose autodidact. It felt fringey and wacky and a bit subversive, like our publication itself. And now we mostly don’t have alt-weeklies anymore, but a lot of what would have been their domain has been effortlessly absorbed and commodified. Even kink is just another menu option these days. And sex toys are on the shelf at Target. So what does “cultural deviance” even mean?

I think the actual alternative culture of the moment is built around people seeking different economic models of creativity and care. Collective art spaces, mutual aid, efforts to opt out of “the market” and its relentless devaluation of art and life and community. Which aren’t going to register as “deviant” in the way that Robert Mapplethorpe did 40 years ago, but are still set up in opposition to the cultural capitalist mainstream.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/69116/1/art-is-getting-weird-again-rosalia-berghain-lux-charli-xcx-ethel-cain

nobody reads anymore, so fewer people write anymore, and if something isn't written about, or read about, it ceases to matter in a way that affects the culture, so essentially most things have ceased to matter apart from the few things that still get written and read about eg electoral politics, AI and menswear

i mean sure people make VIDEOS and PODCASTS about a lot of stuff but videos and podcasts don't matter sorry i don't make the rules

What is there to write about menswear?

I prefer writing about men not wearing anything myself.

From what I can tell the things that get written about are:

Taylor Swift
Female singers not quite as popular as Taylor Swift
Some actor who is handsome
Hollywood people who are suing each other or divorcing
A tv show that is hot right now
a movie that will come out in a year or two

Those are apparently the things that matter

don't forget about the "crisis of masculinity"

Has culture really been flattened by algorithms? Aside from being the usual overstatement based on one person's tiny window onto the arts, seems like blaming guns for shootings.

I certainly see how you can just sink into a specific interest and be fed endless content. My son is into Minecraft, and the algorithm gives him videos where people play Minecraft, make movies inside Minecraft, design the Stranger Things universe in Minecraft, etc. Plus all his friends are consuming and talking about the same content. Seems hard to break out of.

you get a second interest and the videos start showing up for that, too

back in my childhood you got one video game a year and had to make do