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The 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s all had distinct styles unmistakable for any other time, aside of course from a few years into a bordering decade. The 00s and 10s though, not so much? The only difference I notice is the 00s still had a lot more of the 90s left over, and weren't as influenced by the 80s which have made a partial comeback as 80s teens are now the current middle aged people.
Do you think the entire first 1/3 of the 21st century will more or less be similar to today? 2012 isn't hugely different from 2002 and it's hard to imagine 2022 being that different from now.
Do you think the 21st century won't be changeful enough you can tell what decade it is by the fashion, maybe just if it's early, mid or late 21st century?
It only seems that way in retrospect. A decade's legacy is culturally defined, manifested in pop culture and memory.
The 1950s was the decade of the nuclear family, of wholesome conformity, of flag-waving unity.
The 1960s were rebellion and war, long hair and free love.
The 1970s were gritty and seedy, completing what the 1960s had begun into degradation.
The 1980s were greedy and affluent, shiny and polished.
And so forth.
Except those were just general trends that have been magnified in the selective perception of the future, and those perceptions took some time to solidify. So, too, will the perceptions of this decade and the previous one.
@nc17: "Have any subcultures emerged in the 2010s, after hipster and scene culture started in the 2000s? It's like there's been a stagnation in grassroots self-expression in the past several years. I'm not sure whether to blame the Internet or something else."
Well, there's the funny VSCO fad that just recently emerged this year and I guess it counts as a subculture? (Where girls basically try to revive shell necklaces, scrunchies, sideways ponytails, and the cutesy, stereotypical Valley Girl accent) Other than that, no. It's only been 7 years since the hipster style went mainstream. The true emo/scene look died in 2012, btw. Anyone who's still emo or scene after 2012 is doing it for nostalgia.
"I would say that in the 2010s hiphop has almost entirely separated its association with the black community. There's nothing noteworthy about a rapper or R&B singer"
You're right. Most rappers and Hip Hop fans these days blend right in with those corny hipsters ever since Drake, Rick Ross, The New Boyz, Chris Brown, Kanye West and Kreayshawn changed the game. A lot of elements of Hip Hop culture are considered a thing of the past now...
Like low-riders, tricked-out cars with big chrome rims or spinners, baggy/oversized clothes like early Soulja Boy, du-rags & bandanas, bandana hanging out one pocket like Snoop in "Drop It Like It's Hot", excessive bling/jewellery, big hi-top kicks, Cholo eyebrows, eyebrow slits, thin facial hair like early Cam'ron and Shawty Lo, cornrows, one pant leg rolled up, gang-affiliated sports gear, airbrush graffiti apparel, classic white Adidas & Nike shoes, hat turned sideways, Locs sunglasses, big fur coats, etc...
You rarely ever see this stuff anymore. The only traditional elements of Hip Hop culture that are still somewhat common these days are snapbacks & fitteds, dreadlocks, hoodies, plain tees (but usually fitted now to match the skinny jeans), embroidered jeans like True Religions, sweatpants (mostly tapered now), sagging (but not as common these days since most people are wearing tight pants now), Jordan's, Timb's...
Despite Drill Rap and the high murder rate in some cities, Hip Hop culture as a whole for the most part is pretty tame, nerd-friendly and watered down these days compared to the 90's & 00's when all the Hip Hop fans wanted to be gangster and ghetto fabulous. You can even find man-bun hipsters in the hood these days... The watering down of Hip Hop culture may also have to do with Trayvon Martin's death in 2012 and the rise of racial profiling.
Just look at what happened to Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes... Gucci went from a self-proclaimed "Street (you know what)" to a borderline gay hipster in short-shorts with a fake, corny smile after he got outta prison... Lil Wayne wears pink hoodies, Ugg Boots and hipster glasses like a white girl at Starbucks... And Busta Rhymes posed on the red carpet in a DRESS with Martha Stewart...
I'm not gonna say Hip Hop is dead, but it's gone soft and it's past its prime, to say the least. The 90's and the 00's was the golden era of Hip Hop culture.
Not true. It's pretty easy to pinpoint exactly what fashion trends define the current decade by the middle of it if you watch for patterns in the world around you on a regular basis.
"and based on a small, stylish segment of people who lived then. Fact is, only some 50s people were “greasers,” only some 60s people were “hippies,” only some 70s people were disco clubbers, etc. They were isolated trends that got seized upon by the media, and many folks living during these decades had nothing to do with these lifestyles."
You don't understand how fashion trends work... The dress code of a particular subculture ALWAYS eventually becomes the new mainstream style for the masses for a limited time when enough major celebrities discover it and hop on the bandwagon, and then before you know it, the clothing of that particular subculture appears in major department stores because of those beloved celebrities, and now the average person LOOKS like they identify with that subculture when they might just be a fashion victim who copies celebrities and their fellow peers and buys whatever's new in stores. (AKA sheeple)
You don't have to live that subculture's lifestyle to be a part of that group, you just have to fit the description. Everyone knows that. This phenomenon happened with greasers, Beatles-wannabes, hippies, Disco clubbers, Punks, Grunge fans, ghetto-fab gangsters, emos & scenesters and now every trendy person (at least in the Western World) fits the bill of a stereotypical hipster for the last 5 - 7 years.
Even Kim Jong Un wears retro hipster glasses. The hipster look is the most popular, predictable style of the 2010's. I could name more than 50 famous people right off the top of my head who just recently adopted the hipster style. Rappers these days are even influenced by hipsters to some degree.
Hipster culture is more influential than people realize. Modern décor is even hipster-oriented. Just look at any new or re-modeled stores and fast food chains -- Hipsters love dull colors, bland design and wooden floors. They call it 'minimalism', which is very popular these days. The new & re-modeled fast food chains like McDonald's look like artsy hipster cafes that belong Downtown.
Hipster culture is more influential than people realize. Modern décor is even hipster-oriented. Just look at any new or re-modeled stores and fast food chains -- Hipsters love dull colors, bland design and wooden floors. They call it 'minimalism', which is very popular these days. The new & re-modeled fast food chains like McDonald's look like artsy hipster cafes that belong Downtown.
Just a few days ago I was looking at new Wendy's, McDonalds, and Burger King restaurants and I noticed they all look like simple boxes on the outside. They all pretty much look the same but with different signs on them.
Same with the interiors, everything is square and boxy with lots of gray and dark faux wood. Very boring.
@tamajane: So far, there are none right now, it seems. We're not due for another youth subculture fad to take over the world and put hipsterdom in the coffin until maybe the Mid 2020's, unfortunately... A lot of people these days really love the basic hipster look, and it's more popular with guys under 40 than the females, for some reason...
You can't go anywhere for the last 6 years or so without seeing some guy who looks like Billy Mays or Richard Karn from Home Improvement with a taper fade and skinny jeans... It's so lame and predictable. I could easily find and name more than a hundred guys who just recently adopted this look.
I think even Walgreens finally sells those giant, Steve Urkel hipster-nerd glasses now in 2019... It's so annoying. And less than a week ago when I was on the Yahoo lohin page, there was a blonde woman with a Kardashian bun and those retro Malcolm X/Colonel Sanders hipster-nerd glasses that are so popular in the Late 2010's...
There's hardly anything 'edgy', cool, gangster, rebellious and hardcore about the fashion and the overall youth culture in this decade. It's a reflection of the current political climate (politically correct, very gay-friendly and very gender-neutral -- Hence man-buns and men's skinny jeans), a reflection of the rise in technology and 'nerd culture', and a reflection of the current youth's attitude.
When you really think about it, the Late Boomers and Generation X in their youth were generally more cool, rebellious, shocking and 'extreme to the max'... They created Punk and Rap/Hip Hop, they created breakdancing and beatboxing, they created spikey hair and those feathered Glam-Rock mullets (like Tim Heintz in 1987), they created revealing clothing fads like midriff-shirts and off-shoulder dresses, they created the sagging/low-rise pants fad, they popularized 'extreme' sports like skateboarding and surf-boarding, etc...
Millennials and Generation Z in general aren't so extreme and rebellious like that, with the exception of pastel hair and those weird "gauge piercings" where the earlobes are totally stretched out... Most of today's fashion trends are just borrowed from previous generations, and it's mostly the nerdy, tacky, Grunge-related stuff that's being revived.
Millennials are known for starting the emo/scene fashion trend in the Early 00's (which is really a cross between 1960's Beatlemania, Goth, Punk, 1980's New Wave and ghetto-fab gangster all in one), they created Indie/Hipster music and hipster-geek/Coachella fashion, they're known for creating Vaporwave and making 'vintage' hip and trendy, they started memes and they're known for being more engaged in politics than young people have ever been since the Civil Rights Movement -- Hence why self-proclaimed hippies are a thing all over again, but without the Jesus-hair, the tie-dye, the bell bottoms and the John Lennon specs... History repeats itself in subtle ways.
And as for the fashion again, the 2010's is perhaps one of the most unfashionable decades in history. However, I find the "And I oop" VSCO fad/meme a cute, fashionable, amusing step in the right direction, though.
Another creative, honorable mention of the 2010's are those Chief Keef/Juice Wrld/Lil Uzi/6ix 9ine type dreads. It's like a emo/scene hair revival movement, but for Afro Americans. I heard there's even a genre now called "Emo Rap"... I don't know if it's good or not...
You could literally pull an average group of people off the street today, put them in a time machine and send them back to the mid to late 90s, and they would NOT stick out at all.
It seems like we have plateaued for the most part, starting around late 90s/ early 2000s.
These posts are all really dumb, to be frank. You'd think people had pointed out enough that it's stupid to diagnose a decade's culture without some degree of hindsight, but you should still have some sort of eye for what has changed from the previous decade.
Literally nothing about 2010s fashion and 1990s fashion (relatively speaking) is similar. 90s fashion was slouchy and loose-fitting - jewel tones and earth tones ruled. Anti-fashion was in.
Compare that to the 2010s, where everything is mostly slim fit - pants expanded to cigarette line at their widest later on in the decade. Men's shorts rose above the knee for the first time since the 80s. In semi-formal wear, jumpsuits and other one piece outfits were notable, as were maxi dresses, all sorts of boho touches inspired by the mainstream explosion of hipster and "festival fashion" in the early to mid 2010s. Colors were pastel, and matte texture was in. Heavy contouring, full lips, ombre hair were major design trends, and a variety of flat designs, with drop shadows and sans-serif typography were in.
The 2000s, by contrast, favored the tight on top, loose on bottom silhouette, with lots of "hot colors". Hot pinks, oranges, greens, blues and reds were seen a lot. It was split between the early 2000s (inspired by 90s holdover fashion and Y2K), the mid 2000s period (which was very much inspired by the emo look, which went for a bit of a 1960s throwback vibe, with bumped hair, low-rise, flared jeans, and lots of floaty fabrics with paisley design) and the late 2000s (which can be seen somewhat in the early 2010s - 1980s throwback, elements like side-swept bangs on men, shutter shades, more obnoxious use of hot colors and neons, the last era of the "chunky" sneaker, garage and indie rock revival styles which led to skater skirts, scarves, fedoras, ankle boots, high-low dresses for women, etc...)
Whereas the 1990s was defined by minimalism and jewel/earth tones and a loose-fitting silhouette, the 2000s were defined by maximalism/camp, hot colors, and a tight-on-top, loose-on-bottom silhouette, and the 2010s were defined by minimalism again, with neutral and pastel colors gaining popularity, along with slim-fit silhouettes.
As for music, the 90s was a reaction to the synth-tinged 80s, in that, despite autotune, people generally favored more aggressive sounding "alternative rock", which coincided with the grunge boom, and then the popularity of gangster rap and contemporary R&B.
The 2000s was the campier, more highly-colored reflection of a lot of this - it saw the introduction of highly autotuned eurodance and dance-pop, pop rock/power pop revival, pop punk, emo, and crunk/"dirty south" rap, with nu metal being a relevant holdover from the late 90s.
In the 2010s, electronics in music became all encompassing and kind of suffocating. Rap became the biggest, and was found in heavily electronic forms (such as trap). You also had revolutions in the realm of "emo" rap and alternative rap styles. Soul revival was a thing. All sorts of pop became popular - mainly "alt-pop", but also teen pop, indie pop, dream pop, and bedroom pop, a late 2010s lo-fi genre represented by the likes of Billie Eilish and Clairo (Lorde was a harbinger of it as well). Indie rock was a significant holdover from the late 2000s that came to characterize the rock music of the decade - it had strong electronic-psychedelic and folk elements this decade, and was often annoyingly minimalistic. And finally, you had the mainstreaming of Electronic Dance Music, with the Dubstep/Brostep boom in the early/mid 2010s, which quieted down to vaporwave-inspired, cyber-culture influenced minimal techno, witch house, and lo-fi styles by the end of the decade. Huge DJ sets became commonplace at music festivals during the 2010s.
You did have some wild, progressive-electronic rock and metal occurring very, very sporadically in underground scenes of the 2010s, but it hardly made a dent on the mainstream, unlike thrash metal and hardcore punk during the 80s.
Last edited by iandian88; 12-18-2020 at 03:44 PM..
The 90s had a distinctive style? If you ask me. I'd say the 80s was the last era for this.
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