Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past — the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s — looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History. Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972 — giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps — with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins — again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising — all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.
You Say You Want a Devolution? | Style | Vanity Fair. Even if this argument is right — even if styles really have changed less in the past twenty years than in any comparable 20-period in the past century — it’s noteworthy that Andersen keeps saying, “Well, except for technology.” As though technological change — change in our gadgets, our electronic encounters, our newly-digital lives — don’t really count somehow and aren’t matters of style.
Maybe the real story is that a lot of the energy that once was directed towards altering styles of art and fashion has gone for the past twenty years into figuring out how we engage with the digital world. And maybe, as Neal Stephenson has suggested in an interview I quoted from the other day, that pace of digital development will at some point slow down and the pace of stylistic change elsewhere will accelerate once again.
