I think people get the idea that we don’t have culture shifts between decades because it’s hard to parse those shifts until hindsight when time flattens all things, but Zoolander 2 was actually a FANTASTIC example of how much culture shifted from the 2000’s to the 2010’s

There’s that tweet going around about how a “modern Wonder years” would be set in 1992 and millennials are like “but things haven’t changed that much!” But their childhood perception that 1968 was “a long time ago” was because they were like 3 when Wonder Years was running.

Zoolander 2 really highlighted how these characters who were making fun of all the cutting edge pop culture tropes and fashion conventions in 2001 were sooooooo dated and forgotten by 2016.

If you had to recreate “culture from 15 years ago” it would be full of ORLY Owls and Soviet Russia jokes, no one would have smartphones, and the “let me speak to the manger” haircut would still be the “scene girl” haircut

Really, Millennials treat the 80’s like the last decade that had a distinct cultural identity because the 80’s are the last decade that was “before their time” and as such, was the first decade they observed after it has been flattened to the distillation of its highlights.

This was something I thought a lot about working on Barbie, because the Barbie brand is constantly being updated for the new market of 4 year olds who are only familiar with the most current design trends and are hypersensitive to packaging/colours/fashion looking “old”

Like, in my head I was like “Barbie’s basically looked the same since I was a kid, it was the Barbies before my childhood that looked weird, then I realized like “oh, these would look dated as shit to modern children”

I had this realization like, oh, all the soft-muted-dusty-florals that I think of as “old lady colours” are only “old lady colours” now because they were popular with women who were young in the 60’s, and all the black-and-neon shit I like is already dated to modern youths.

Fun bonus thing related to this point; consider the colour palettes used to market toys aimed at young girls compared to colour palettes menstrual product branding gravitates towards 10-15 years later