It's an interesting phenomenon that you can observe with other things as well like tastes in music. I think it has something to do with people having access to about sixty years of people trying out just about everything they could think off. It's all been done before at this point and it's all available in new and fresh forms. So, it's no longer about collectively picking something that is genuinely new but individuals cherry-picking whatever that they like. And it helps of course that we're not funneling media through a handful of TV channels, newspapers, etc. anymore like we used to. So people cherry pick where they get their information as well.

> It's all been done before

Until something new is done ;)

The sound pallette is just about infinite with what's possible.s.

I think modern music has become homogenous because true art is risky and won't pass a modern focus group.

I keep waiting for inside-out clothes to be a thing. Hipsters were getting close at one point.

back around 2002 I had some T shirts from the Gap (so, pretty mainstream) that had the visible stitching and tags look like the shirt was inside out; sort of a duplicate in that if you actually wore them inside out they still looked inside out. the only way to really tell was the little washing instructions tag on the inside.

i really liked them, was sad when they went away

They are. Lots of sweaters with seams on the outside.

I'm talking actually taking clothes not crafted to be worn inside-out.

Take your favorite pair of pants with seams and put them on inside out. Favorite button-down or polo, etc.

Probably more that’s it’s much easier to market and sell something that’s been done before than come up with something new. Also our supply chains are highly specialized for the stuff we currently make. In 3-5 years we will see bell shaped pants back again as we go from 90’s repeats to 00’s repeats which were 70’s repeats. Etc etc.

Perhaps another less depressing reason is the intersection of two things:

1) For all its negatives, online culture makes it easier to find and acknowledge different groups with different tastes that share yours, you're not as subject to having to "fit in" just with those near you. Maybe another way to say it is that fewer things are "weird" because it's easy to find others doing something similar

2) The availability of styles is not quite as bottlenecked into a limited number of taste-makers like it used to be.

For me, think it's probably more your second idea, that we're not funneling media through a handful of TV channels, newspapers, etc. anymore like we used to. This creates (for better or worse) more of a "group think" mentality, since they've all seen the same tv shows and movies, and become more in sync with their views on all things, cultural, political... So people's sense of fashion is also in sync as well as the need to fit in.

Is that really true? It is true for me, but I always assumed that is just because I were younger last century. In 1990 I could easily tell if someone was looking like 1980, but today I could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025. I would be happy to learn that this is because fashion actually slowed down, but until proven wrong I will just assume it is because I am older and not paying attention.

> I could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025

It's the length of the socks

And the width of the pants

And the length of the pants vs the socks

How long are socks supposed to be now?

Apparently Gen Z prefer crew socks as opposed to millennial ankle socks.

> could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025.

If you don't think the younger generation dress crazily then fashion didn't change. Every previous generation thought the next generations clothes were crazy.

It's easier to identify women's fashion among millennials imo:

2000's: jeans

2010's: leggings

2020's: not those

It’s because you were younger. As a “Gen Z” person, there’s a huge difference between 2010s fashions and the fashions of today.

Well there's very little "common" cultural influence these days. It used to be that you could see a significant episode of a TV show and EVERYONE was talking about it the next day in the office. Now you're lucky if you can even find one person that has seen the show you're even talking about, let alone if they are "caught up" on it since many people prefer to buffer a few episodes while they watch other things.

Agreed, I think the last of the shows where everyone talked about was Game of Thrones.

This cultural phenomenon is sometimes called "the Long 90s"

>edit: Score 4695 Avg. Years Off 3.0

How is that even possible? Only three years off? I thought guessing it which tens would be good enough. Getting the last digit right is impossible without blind luck? Or am I missing something?

I got 3.2. Spoilers below.

Round 1 I just guessed in the middle of the 70s.

Round 2 I was 5 years off, but I should have been able to get closer if I'd slowed down. Someone with a better knowledge of modern Middle Eastern uprisings or Arabic could have read the signs, but also the tech in everyone's hands was pretty closely dated.

Round 3 was pretty clearly the London Blitz—the uniform was WW2 era and people were piled on top of each other in a London Tube station—which narrowed it down to basically a single year.

Round 4 was another guess-the-decade shot, I was 6 years off (I guessed 1940). Had I thought about it harder it would have been unlikely to have been taken during WW2, which would have bumped my guess up a few years to be closer.

Round 5 was a bunch of protesters who were pretty clearly in the mid-to-late 2000s (cell phone in the background), and the topic of their protest was gay marriage which had a single very important flashpoint in that decade with Prop 8 in 2008.

Round 1 was the same.

Round 2 I guessed it was something to do with Arab Spring but without looking up the year of it happened I remember it was late 00s or early 10s so I put 2010.

Round 3

>and people were piled on top of each other in a London Tube station—which narrowed it down to basically a single year.

Not sure that is a knowledge I know but I only guess it was WWII, again without looking it up I only remember it as the 40s.

Round 4 I had the same thought so I guess something like 1960s because I thought it wasn't WWII.

Round 5, not from US so I only know / heard of Prop 8 when Mozilla fired their CTO Brendan Eich. I thought it happened in early to mid 2010s.

I averaged 5 years off, but my average would have been much better without one photo that I botched by 16 years because I'm unfamiliar with early 19th century swimsuit styles.

There were 2 major world events represented, that helps. Clothing style helps.

If you guessed the 19th century, you were off by a bit more than 16 years.

And here I complain about people erroneously specifying EST all summer along. They’re only off by 1 hour.

I skip specifying Standard or Daylight time altogether, and just use ET (or CT, MT, etc). Much easier on my brain, and nobody actually cares which they're in at the moment.

4586 Avg. years off 5

I felt like I should have been able to be closer. The images wouldn't zoom on my phone though. I'm impressed by three years off but would consider it quite possible for somone who knows their history.

I got one off by 20 years, oops. But there's two where I think you can get exact or off by 1 with some knowledge of world events, maybe it's a 50/50 shot. And there's two where the half-decade is pretty clear.

Score 4722 Avg. Years Off 2.6 here. Spoilers: I got two exactly right (Arab Spring, Battle of Britain) and one off by a year (dancing). The two exacts were pretty obviously tied to specific dated events, and I both love history and have a pretty easy time remembering dates. I love this sort of game, as I do trivia, history trivia especially.

For some images, it involves some luck. But one image was WWII for example, that one is much easier to get accurately.

> Score: 4947; Avg. Years Off: 1.2

Skill issue.

It's called "stuck culture". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyi-KGwuR9c

I would say athleisure is a recent development. 10 years ago you'd see far fewer women wearing tight leggings outside the gym. Heck, even in gyms you'd be hard pressed to see the kind of tank tops and sport bras you regularly see nowadays [1]

N.B. I'm just noting the phenomenon, not commenting on its merits

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/women-are-intimidating-men-w...

I’ve never seen women wearing that kind of outfits in gyms in Norway or France, but I see it all the time online. Is it an American thing?

Can't comment on the USA, but I'm seeing a fair number of them in Canada and (somewhat less commonly) in Croatia.

Not uncommon in Norway, at least at few gyms I've been to after they reopened after COVID.

Lindy.

[delayed]

I found it equally interesting how much you can identify a photo's time period by the film qualities.