Has pop culture reached a perpetual now?

[Del Tachi]

Eh, there's a heavy type of selection bias going on when we talk about things like this.

Of course the current time period would seem "boring", we're living in it.  Previous decades are presented to us as caricatures, which makes it easy for us to exaggerate the differences between different eras of pop culture.  When people in 2015 talk about comparing 1979 and 1985, what they're actually doing is contrasting the most outlandish, rememberable icons and styles of the 1970s and 1980s, and, in such a scenario, the resulting comparison ends-up looking outrageously trendy and kitsch.

We're not far enough removed from the 2000s to have regulated it to a caricature quite yet, and we only began doing that with the "1990s" about 4-7 years ago.  Just give us a bit more time and we'll be ready to all look back at ourselves and laugh in a few years.       

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

You can only really judge a period of time in retrospect.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Fashion has gone through some pretty dramatic shifts over the past decade. I could go through an itemized list of changes but there's an easier approach: go to your social network of choice and compare pictures of younger friends or relatives. I cringe when I look at 2005 fashion, it's not remotely comparable to 2015 fashion.

There was a huge shift from roughly 2003-2008 and then almost no change since then.

For example, here's the 2008 cast of Saturday Night Live:



These are hip, youngish people who try to be out there with their fashion choices, but everything still pretty much works today, except for Jason Sudeikis's blazer-over-polo-shirt-over-t-shirt getup, which we'd now consider to make one look like a tool.

Edit: fixed photo

Those choices wouldn't look out of place but they'd be considered quite unfashionable in 2015, something that "basic" people in "flyover" country would wear.

[tpfkaw]

Those choices wouldn't look out of place but they'd be considered quite unfashionable in 2015, something that "basic" people in "flyover" country would wear.

I'm saying there's been slow change, not no change. You look at almost any other 7-year period and what's fashionable changes a lot more, although we should take into account Republican95's caveat that we tend to remember the most distinctive styles from each decade and ignore the stuff that stays constant.

[checkers]

It's also worth noting that women's fashion changes at a much faster rate than men's. The men's outfits there are acceptable, but not particularly fashion forward - the women's (particularly the woman in purple on the left) is clearly way out of date. It would be hard to find a woman wearing something like that today. This distinction between the sexes is pretty much standard, with certain exceptions re men's fashion pertaining to rapid social/cultural change (the 1790s and the 1960s jump out at me though I might be forgetting something).

The palette of that picture and the colours people are wearing strike me as somehow also very dated? Kind of a mid-late 00's multi-cam sitcom. I feel like today's aesthetic tends to be duller in colour. Though it's hard to point things like this out when you're living through it, of course.