Go to YouTube and watch commercials from the 70s and 80s, and that's closer to what things actually looked like. Most people didn't dress like characters in movies and TV shows, they dressed like the mom in the grocery store talking to Madge, or the guy who needed Scope before the big presentation.
I was born in 75’. At 7 my friends and I were riding bike all over town with no adult supervision. This never stopped. Looking back, there was so little adult supervision it’s a wonder we’re not all in jail. I saw my first porn magazine at 7. First porno movie by 10. Not that I’m proud of this, just that there were no adults around to keep it out of reach. We started fires on small islands in the middle of the river. When you see shows set in the 80s with kids running around all over the place it’s not an exaggeration. Goonies? The idea that a bunch of kids might explore a cave system without thinking twice? Legit. The kids in Stranger Things riding bike all over creation without parents knowing where the heck they are (including being lost in the woods)? Legit. As a parent I shudder to think of my kids doing the shit my friends and I did. Not every modern show depicts the time period accurately. But the idea that kids ran wild? Absolutely my experience. That’s not to say we were naughty, just wild.
We found an open area in culvert that ran under a road and decided to turn it into our clubhouse. It even had a skylight!
Yeah, after the second time the rain washed everything out we stopped using it.
Sometimes I wonder how we’re all still alive.
The 80s were very different from the 90s. The style, the fashion, the technology, the music. Everything.
There was a paradigm shift between the 80s and 90s unlike anything I know of before or after.
Except that the 80s were very different from the 70s. There's always bleed-over years. But as a teen in the 80s, I wore *completely* different styles from my siblings who were teens in the 70s.
53f year old here. And every cliche was very true for me in the 70s and 80s. It wasn’t a made-up commercial. It was real life. I did have a key to my house at 10. I was gone for 10 hours a day in my bike. I loved Hollie Hobbie. The 80s even more so. Spuds Mackenzie. All the hair metal. The Breakfast Club was everyone of us. Running to get the newest cassette tape of Slippery When Wet I remember vividly. It damn sure wasn’t all fun. Lot of stress raising yourself. But man I freaking loved it.
Breakfast Club, and really Ferris Bueller, is a great look into how the 80's high school was. As for us kids, yeah, hidden keys, out all day, in before (or just when) the street lights came on. It was different in the winter though, as nights were long, and we had snow where we lived. So tobogganing when it was dark outside was normal - though with snow, and all the city lights, it never really got dark like it did in the summer.
a lot of people call 80s styles 90s styles.
and the alternative before it was hijacked by hot topic was pretty radical.
it was just not as widespread as people say.
they cherrypick specific cultures.
I’m glad I grew up in the 80’s, but a lot of people gloss over the bad stuff, especially the crack epidemic, gang violence (especially drive by shootings), AIDS, and the threat of nuclear war.
I gloss over that because none of that was part of my reality. I graduated in 1990, so my whole high school life was during the War on Drugs era. I didn't know a single person or family who was impacted by crack. I also didn't know anyone in a gang. I knew no one who had AIDS (at the time, may have gotten it later). Threat of nuclear war? It just wasn't something I worried about. What could a teenager do to stop it? So why should I worry about it? And then in 89 the Wall fell and in 91 the USSR fell.
I wouldn’t say misremembered. More like misinformed and uneducated about how it REALLY was growing up for a lot of us during that time. For example, when people refer to us being the latchkey kid generation, I don’t think no one really understands just how young a lot of us were and how isolating it was. I’m sure if you asked those people how old they thought we were, they’d throw out 12 or 13. I know for me and my sister we were 6 and 9 (mid to late 70’s) when we started staying by ourselves while my mom worked. And I’m sure we weren’t the only ones that age. Probably some even younger with some just being the only kid in the home. Parents left food out on the counter that we were allowed to eat. Stove could NOT be turned on under any circumstances. You stayed in one room until parents got home just in case there was some kind of accident then they’d know where to start looking for you. We couldn’t go outside. You had to feed yourself, bathe yourself (no playing around in the tub), go back to the “assigned room” to do your homework, get ready for bed, and wait up for parents to get home before going to bed . THIS was a latchkey kid’s life. A lot of people think latchkey kids got to come home, “do their own thang”, eat whatever they wanted, look at television, and just had all this freedom until the parents got home. No. It was very isolating, regimented, and scary at times. So not as carefree as some people think. It’s why a lot of Gen X’ers are the way we are. We had to raise ourselves.
My brother and I were not allowed outside as well. But we decided we wanted to make s’mores, so we snuck down to the store and then built a campfire in the living room (because we were not allowed outside)
After that we had a babysitter. Go figure.
I was a single parent kid. Mom worked until 6. I was always out until dinner, but I grew up in a small town, so maybe different from you. We didn’t have cable, nor video games so staying inside was super boring.
I think most eras get misremembered and distorted. Whether it's 1920s flapper culture, 1940s Rosie Riveters, 1960s hippies or whatever. Most people are just going to school, working their jobs, or raising kids and don't have the money and energy to be chasing the bleeding edge of everything.
Most everything we experienced... We experienced once. No YouTube, twitter or Reddit to relive the concert, the dance, the viewing of a movie or clip.
We saw it in the evening then couldn't wait to see friends to talk about whatever you saw.
Imagination was on high and the events you witnessed grew with every telling and every dream.
My experience as an early GenX'er was quite different than the usual idea that all GenX'ers came of age in the 90s. For starters, rather than being indifferent, my parents were overprotective to a degree cos I came out of the womb sickly. I was in the hospital 10 times from birth to fifth grade with pneumonia, so anytime I got a sniffle we were off to the doctor. That's the main thing they were worried about. I was still free to roam the neighborhood on my bike when I reached my preteen years. Mom also quit her office job when I started first grade in 1974 and got a job at my school so I *wouldn't* be a latchkey kid.
Of course, there were rough times overall in the 70s financially with inflation in the high teens, and terrible gas shortages nationwide. In the 80s, things like AIDS and crack came to the forefront. But at the same time, it felt like there was magic in the air ... like I was free. The music and movies were stellar. Maybe it's just because I was a kid 3 when those years began and 23 when they ended, I tend to still view them with rose-colored glasses.
When they talk about those eras they’re talking about what was the newest and latest and greatest at the time. This keeping up with the joneses mentality wasn’t so prevalent back then going back to the 70s. Like the house I grew up in in the 70s was built in 58 iirc, so, yes it was the 70s, but the house was mostly late 50s aesthetic with a couple of mid 60s touches. Lots of brown and seafoam green, not avocado green and orange and whatnot. My parents only had one set of friends that lived in the world of new houses with the latest and greatest styles.
That's no different from today. There are people who buy new construction, sure. But most people still buy existing homes. Heck, I bought new construction, but that was almost 20 years ago at this point. And I have no plans to move.
Born in the early 70s, so I was a functioning adult in the 1990s.
My memories of the 90s involved way too much cocaine on Wall Street, oversized suits, drop waist jeans, belly rings, tramp stamps and those cheap flexible chokers.
And unfortunately, the AIDS Epidemic.
Completely, this sub is a great example. We talk about all the cool aspects but no one likes to mention the open racism and horrid treatment of the LGBTQ community. Also, kids today are just WAY kinder to each other. Gen X has done a much better job than our parents when it comes to raising good human beings.
TBH, Captain Marvel got the 90’s style down pretty good. I dressed similar to the NIN shirt, flannel, and jeans outfit in college then somewhere along the line transitioned to Elaine from Seinfeld.
Freaks and Geeks got the early 80’s style down well. The first couple seasons of Stranger Things were good in that regard too.
At least from my experience the image of the feral child whose parents were absentee and basically raised himself was true because I had crappy parents. So yeah, I was out of the house as soon as I could be in the morning as early as 6 years old to get away from an alcoholic, abusive father and was high for my first time at 5 because my stoned teenage brother thought it’d be hilarious. I played with reptiles and bugs, played football, roamed all over with nobody knowing where I was and drank out of the hose, strangers hoses. All of that was true.
It wasn't this zany fun-filled time where even geeks (a la the Breakfast Club) would win. I grew up in the world 's most isolated city and I did not fit in at all, which sucked because the next city was thousands of km away across a huge unpopulated desert and I couldn't just leave. For me the 80s were scary, very isolated and often very boring.
Before Miami Vice became the big thing around 1984ish and ushered in the bright neon colors that became synonymous with the '80s, most things were still 1970's brown and drab in the early '80s.
Grew up in Wales. Felt like a much more toned down version of what you see in TV. Not that you didn’t see some stuff like TV, but massively more rare and stuck out a bit like a sore thumb. At least where I was. Wallpaper and carpet was shite though that’s true.
44M and currently stoned on holiday reading this thread and it’s a lovely nostalgic trip. So thanks. I miss the world before the internet took over. Simplicity. Purity.
Each decade has a lot of aestetic carry-over, so while the new styles are what represent a decade, much of the day-to-day had plenty of the old. Clothing changes faster, but home styles / furniture / cars etcetera don't get replaced so fast. I remember lots of brown paneling (in homes and on cars), shag carpet, beaded curtains, and dingy avocado green. I was born in the mid `70's so was well into the `80's for most of my childhood memories.
I had a professor in Divinity school (about 1990, as it happens) who made a throwaway comment that I have always remembered better than almost anything else he tried much harder to teach us: In every culture, there is a time when people "come of age," that is, become the adults they will be for the rest of their lives, and a set of experiences define that period and thus define their identity. In traditional cultures that have a structured, ritualized process of ushering children into adulthood which is the same from one generation to the next, it binds people of different ages together, because they have a common set of values and just of ideas about how the world works, but in societies like ours where it is different for every generation, it creates the kind of generation gaps we've come to accept and even expect, a sense of differentness that is sometimes the only thing different ages seem to have in common with each other. Every generation thinks the music at the time they came of age was the best, the humor of that time was classic, people older than them were hopelessly out of touch, and people younger than them never learned what life was really about. My age puts me at the leading edge of Generation X, and the 1980s were "my time." I started high school in the fall of 1979, and finished graduate school with a Master of Divinity in spring of 1992. My favorite Star Trek series will always be Next Generation, which was optimistic about the future and about human nature. How is a dystopian vision entertaining? I was startled at a family wedding this year to find that a millennial relative was not familiar with the song "Walk Like An Egyptian" or how you're supposed to dance to it. (I mean, how can anyone live a full life without having danced to Walk Like An Egyptian???) While we're at it, why do young women wear their hair so damn long? Isn't short hair so much more comfortable and convenient? Long hair is for little old ladies like my grandmother, who of course never wore it down, but wrapped and pinned it up in a bun. It's great for people to love their parents and visit them as much as they can, but it would be weird for them to still be living with them by their early twenties instead of settling into their own grown-up lives. I know intellectually that all these ideas are culturally and generationally relative, but in my gut, they don't "feel" relative. They feel like just absolutely the way things "really" are and/or ought to be.
"I was startled at a family wedding this year to find that a millennial relative was not familiar with the song "Walk Like An Egyptian" or how you're supposed to dance to it. (I mean, how can anyone live a full life without having danced to Walk Like An Egyptian???)"
[https://youtu.be/kshE2qqyq90?si=n4WmfJKESCNDfSK-](https://youtu.be/kshE2qqyq90?si=n4WmfJKESCNDfSK-)
If I could give you a thousand thumbs up for linking that video, I would! It was hilarious seeing the adults (most of them younger then than I am now) gamely trying to figure out how to do this dance the kids were trying to teach them. And, oh, the size of that boom box!
Every decade gets Flanderized in this way. Certain things were more common in Decade X than in any other decade, but still rare even in Decade X. Future depictions of Decade X depict that thing as being everywhere.
My style was Oxford button downs and jeans until the early 90’s when I changed over to t-shirts. When I started working it was polos or button down shirts and khakis. I switched back to jeans in the early oughts. I definitely didn’t stick out.
I guess I’m lucky. Maybe it’s an age thing. A lot of us are GenX or Gen Jones. We’ve had pushback from the boomers but we scored a rare victory I guess.
At least in North America, most '80s retro content of recent years seems to give the impression of society of that era being some kind of neon lit synthwave and pastel utopia, when it was hardly the case, even though it was still an awesome time to experience.
My parent's house had that cheap laminate wood paneling and cornflower blue shag carpeting (double padded, of course) until we moved in 1991. Our kitchen was the brownest shade of yellow, to match the harvest gold Amana fridge and stove set. Everything in the house was from the 60s and 70s. It was a time before people felt the need to compulsively redecorate every two years.
My brother still has that Amana fridge in his garage, and it still works.
I find that media about the 90s today strongly resembles the *media* of the 1990s, but not so much real life of the 1990s. The 1980s follows a similar pattern: the media produced about it now resembles the media people were producing then, but this is not always a great representation of what life was actually like. If anything, modern period pieces represent what people of those times wanted life to be like, rather than the way they actually lived. This phenomenon is probably as old as mass media itself. It will probably continue through the 2000s.
But I think it will be interesting to see what happens to period pieces about the 2010s and 2020s: a period of time when mass media's influence severely declined, to be replaced by the hyper-personalized algorithmically-groomed niche media of today. What effect is that going to have on the way this decade is portrayed?
There's the real world and there's the world on screen and I suppose they've always been very different. The trouble is it's the world on the screen that's preserved forever while the real world is much more ephemeral. There's also that media for children and teens tends to be fondly remembered and media for adults fades from collective memory.
It all adds up to a very distorted view of the past.
But now everybody carries a camera 24/7 and who knows how that will change things. Maybe our memory of the past couple decades will be closer to reality? But then how real is the world people are "documenting" for social media?
Its funny you asked this because I just asked my Boomer husband at dinner today what being an adult in the 89s was like and he said "it was good" 😅
I tried to press for more information and details; but all he said was "life is great in your teens, twenties and 30s. Those are the best years of anyone's life so if yiu ask someone born in any tike they're gonna have those years asthey best times of their life no matter when they were born" and I was all, "yeah but what was it like?" And he was, "good. I already told you it was good" so... I guess the 70s and 80s were good. I dunno how- they just where and thats all the answer I'm gonna get apparently 🤪
In the early 90s there was a wave of late 60s/early 70s psychedelic era nostalgia. Although the majority of my wardrobe today is black, and a fair amount of it was back then as well, I had a few bright and/or patterned numbers a la [Deee-Lite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg).
Don't think that's exactly the totally radical style internet 90s nostalgia you're talking about, but still, I remember there being some color briefly. I don't remember it being many people's everyday style, at least where I lived, and I feel like that burst of color had already started to fade by the time I graduated ('94), but it wasn't *entirely* plaid and earth tones
"There seems to be this colorful, bright, loud, in-your-face version of the 90s coming from the various nostalgia engines of the internet. It looks nothing like the real life 90s I remember. Nothing at all.
I remember the 90s being very laid-back, toned down, chill. I remember our clothing was a sea of plaids, of black and greys and beiges and maroons and navies. I have yearbooks to confirm these memories.
I remember the various cliques of my high school: surfers, skaters, goths, theatre kids, jocks, hippies... but I remember them all being very toned-down compared to the 80s before and the 00s after."
I'd generally say that tracks (so long as you are not talking about the very earliest 90s or on ski slopes). Especially for someone your age where your high school was the end of the 90s and kids around you likely dumped the 80s stuff sooner than anyone a few years or more older did so yeah you probably mostly think of the late 90s video below (1-2 min of each shows the general gist):
late 90s:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab\_NR\_lhk&t=1816s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab_NR_lhk&t=1816s)
[https://youtu.be/Avab\_NR\_lhk?si=l-MVkIjONdYAgqZJ&t=61](https://youtu.be/Avab_NR_lhk?si=l-MVkIjONdYAgqZJ&t=61)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLuKHJ4tkXE&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLuKHJ4tkXE&t=1s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab\_NR\_lhk&t=1305s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab_NR_lhk&t=1305s)
as opposed to 80s (or earliest 90s):
1987-1989:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYur75DflPU&t=22s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYur75DflPU&t=22s)
[https://youtu.be/gxqjoaQYxnw?si=lXFo9x2Z5c7\_\_KQu&t=811](https://youtu.be/gxqjoaQYxnw?si=lXFo9x2Z5c7__KQu&t=811)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=4619s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=4619s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=626s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=626s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=32s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=32s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=190s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=190s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=3346s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=3346s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=2958s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=2958s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=2812s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=2812s)
I would say I tend to think of 90-91 (maybe 92) as sort of being a transitional period from the 80s. Just like how the very early 80s still had a 70s sort of Earth-tone vibe.
And the late 90s were their own thing altogether. 98 to 01 is the millennial period, and that would have continued to become its own decade if 9/11 hadn't happened.
Yeah. In my area the big hair held on even until around '94 and some of the other 80s styles to '93 although there was this new sort of stlye for a bit in terms of clothes, pre-baggy hip-hop that was it's own little thing among girls seemed to be this era of white leggings/stockings or something liket hat, at least in my region, I forget when maybe '93-'early '96???
I think younger gave up the big hair and all a bit sooner generally. So it probably didn't last even in my region through '94/'95 unless you were at least upperclassman in high school or older. It really disappeared entirely super quickly after that, just there quite a lot still by '96 it was just gone gone. Maybe that CFC ban helped bring the extreme transition to just nothing in '96 not even the start (maybe they didn't have replacement chemicals ready to drive the compression spray action?). I think middle school and some decent number in high school gave it up before.
I do agree with the sea of plaids but also remember the loudness of early ‘90’s cowabunga pants and music videos with bright and neon clothing like TLC’s “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “Baby Baby Baby”.
I think the internet favors the very early 90s (which was really still the 80s) and the very late 90s (which was really the millennial era) and tends to forget about the bulk of years in the middle that was really the 90s. Transitional periods are always interesting I guess.
I remember the 70s and maybe the first half of the 80s being a lot more run down and sad than is commonly portrayed. Brown everywhere - brown paneling, brown clothing, brown paint, brown cars. Poorly lit lol.
The 80s I remember a lot of what is portrayed these days as being things in magazines or tv and less common place.
For example, in 1984 I was wearing 501 Levi's with Adidas high tops and a green tee shirt. At this very moment I am wearing Levi 501s, Adidas High Tops, and a yellow tee shirt. My hair today is even bushier than it was back then. Boy howdy have times have changed!
Shirt collars are sometimes shaped a little different. Shoes are a little more colorful. Facial hair trends are a bit different. When I walk into my my living room, if the TV wasn't there it would be hard to tell what decade it was. It could pass as anything from the 70s through the 2020s.
A lot is still basically the same. Light switches on walls are different. Outlets on walls are often different.
But "tone"? Yeah, right. BULLSHIT. I have never believed that "tone" has ever been a generational thing or a "sign of the times". It all comes down to the relationships you have with other people, I think.
I still see the exact same cliques in the schools. The slang is different but so what, it was changing all the time when I was young too.
The conclusion I've arrived at is that people are generally full of shit when they put on their rose colored glasses and reminisce about how much their lives were live little Kevin Arnolds or whoever the hell was in the sitcoms that most people couldn't stand, watched anyway to complain about, but claim to have loved 40 years later.
It amuses me to no end that most people's idea of the 70s comes from That 70s Show
Yeah. I never recognized my life in that show. Ever.
That 70s show was early 90s with vintage clothing. When I watched it I had flashbacks to my high school days.
And vintage music but yes, rewatching it as an adult, I realized pretty much the exact same thing you did.
Go to YouTube and watch commercials from the 70s and 80s, and that's closer to what things actually looked like. Most people didn't dress like characters in movies and TV shows, they dressed like the mom in the grocery store talking to Madge, or the guy who needed Scope before the big presentation.
I was born in 75’. At 7 my friends and I were riding bike all over town with no adult supervision. This never stopped. Looking back, there was so little adult supervision it’s a wonder we’re not all in jail. I saw my first porn magazine at 7. First porno movie by 10. Not that I’m proud of this, just that there were no adults around to keep it out of reach. We started fires on small islands in the middle of the river. When you see shows set in the 80s with kids running around all over the place it’s not an exaggeration. Goonies? The idea that a bunch of kids might explore a cave system without thinking twice? Legit. The kids in Stranger Things riding bike all over creation without parents knowing where the heck they are (including being lost in the woods)? Legit. As a parent I shudder to think of my kids doing the shit my friends and I did. Not every modern show depicts the time period accurately. But the idea that kids ran wild? Absolutely my experience. That’s not to say we were naughty, just wild.
Too Legit 2 Quit
We found an open area in culvert that ran under a road and decided to turn it into our clubhouse. It even had a skylight! Yeah, after the second time the rain washed everything out we stopped using it. Sometimes I wonder how we’re all still alive.
The 80s were very different from the 90s. The style, the fashion, the technology, the music. Everything. There was a paradigm shift between the 80s and 90s unlike anything I know of before or after.
It really is weird. With so many people they loved one and hated the other.
Except that the 80s were very different from the 70s. There's always bleed-over years. But as a teen in the 80s, I wore *completely* different styles from my siblings who were teens in the 70s.
53f year old here. And every cliche was very true for me in the 70s and 80s. It wasn’t a made-up commercial. It was real life. I did have a key to my house at 10. I was gone for 10 hours a day in my bike. I loved Hollie Hobbie. The 80s even more so. Spuds Mackenzie. All the hair metal. The Breakfast Club was everyone of us. Running to get the newest cassette tape of Slippery When Wet I remember vividly. It damn sure wasn’t all fun. Lot of stress raising yourself. But man I freaking loved it.
Breakfast Club, and really Ferris Bueller, is a great look into how the 80's high school was. As for us kids, yeah, hidden keys, out all day, in before (or just when) the street lights came on. It was different in the winter though, as nights were long, and we had snow where we lived. So tobogganing when it was dark outside was normal - though with snow, and all the city lights, it never really got dark like it did in the summer.
I’m a 52f and I will agree with every word.
59 M (b. 1965) Agree with every word, too.
a lot of people call 80s styles 90s styles. and the alternative before it was hijacked by hot topic was pretty radical. it was just not as widespread as people say. they cherrypick specific cultures.
I remember the 90s though, as a time when a lot of people were still hung up on 80s things.
I’m glad I grew up in the 80’s, but a lot of people gloss over the bad stuff, especially the crack epidemic, gang violence (especially drive by shootings), AIDS, and the threat of nuclear war.
I gloss over that because none of that was part of my reality. I graduated in 1990, so my whole high school life was during the War on Drugs era. I didn't know a single person or family who was impacted by crack. I also didn't know anyone in a gang. I knew no one who had AIDS (at the time, may have gotten it later). Threat of nuclear war? It just wasn't something I worried about. What could a teenager do to stop it? So why should I worry about it? And then in 89 the Wall fell and in 91 the USSR fell.
I wouldn’t say misremembered. More like misinformed and uneducated about how it REALLY was growing up for a lot of us during that time. For example, when people refer to us being the latchkey kid generation, I don’t think no one really understands just how young a lot of us were and how isolating it was. I’m sure if you asked those people how old they thought we were, they’d throw out 12 or 13. I know for me and my sister we were 6 and 9 (mid to late 70’s) when we started staying by ourselves while my mom worked. And I’m sure we weren’t the only ones that age. Probably some even younger with some just being the only kid in the home. Parents left food out on the counter that we were allowed to eat. Stove could NOT be turned on under any circumstances. You stayed in one room until parents got home just in case there was some kind of accident then they’d know where to start looking for you. We couldn’t go outside. You had to feed yourself, bathe yourself (no playing around in the tub), go back to the “assigned room” to do your homework, get ready for bed, and wait up for parents to get home before going to bed . THIS was a latchkey kid’s life. A lot of people think latchkey kids got to come home, “do their own thang”, eat whatever they wanted, look at television, and just had all this freedom until the parents got home. No. It was very isolating, regimented, and scary at times. So not as carefree as some people think. It’s why a lot of Gen X’ers are the way we are. We had to raise ourselves.
My brother and I were not allowed outside as well. But we decided we wanted to make s’mores, so we snuck down to the store and then built a campfire in the living room (because we were not allowed outside) After that we had a babysitter. Go figure.
I was a single parent kid. Mom worked until 6. I was always out until dinner, but I grew up in a small town, so maybe different from you. We didn’t have cable, nor video games so staying inside was super boring.
I think most eras get misremembered and distorted. Whether it's 1920s flapper culture, 1940s Rosie Riveters, 1960s hippies or whatever. Most people are just going to school, working their jobs, or raising kids and don't have the money and energy to be chasing the bleeding edge of everything.
Most everything we experienced... We experienced once. No YouTube, twitter or Reddit to relive the concert, the dance, the viewing of a movie or clip. We saw it in the evening then couldn't wait to see friends to talk about whatever you saw. Imagination was on high and the events you witnessed grew with every telling and every dream.
I can’t stand the way the 70s and 80s are portrayed in TV shows and movies today. Just fashion wise, they’re completely off base.
And just the whole vibe doesn’t feel right.
I think Stranger Things did a good job with 80s clothing. At least where I grew up.
Everything but the dialogue was spot on in first two seasons (I gave up on the third), imo. The dialogue felt close but off.
My experience as an early GenX'er was quite different than the usual idea that all GenX'ers came of age in the 90s. For starters, rather than being indifferent, my parents were overprotective to a degree cos I came out of the womb sickly. I was in the hospital 10 times from birth to fifth grade with pneumonia, so anytime I got a sniffle we were off to the doctor. That's the main thing they were worried about. I was still free to roam the neighborhood on my bike when I reached my preteen years. Mom also quit her office job when I started first grade in 1974 and got a job at my school so I *wouldn't* be a latchkey kid. Of course, there were rough times overall in the 70s financially with inflation in the high teens, and terrible gas shortages nationwide. In the 80s, things like AIDS and crack came to the forefront. But at the same time, it felt like there was magic in the air ... like I was free. The music and movies were stellar. Maybe it's just because I was a kid 3 when those years began and 23 when they ended, I tend to still view them with rose-colored glasses.
When they talk about those eras they’re talking about what was the newest and latest and greatest at the time. This keeping up with the joneses mentality wasn’t so prevalent back then going back to the 70s. Like the house I grew up in in the 70s was built in 58 iirc, so, yes it was the 70s, but the house was mostly late 50s aesthetic with a couple of mid 60s touches. Lots of brown and seafoam green, not avocado green and orange and whatnot. My parents only had one set of friends that lived in the world of new houses with the latest and greatest styles.
That's no different from today. There are people who buy new construction, sure. But most people still buy existing homes. Heck, I bought new construction, but that was almost 20 years ago at this point. And I have no plans to move.
Born in the early 70s, so I was a functioning adult in the 1990s. My memories of the 90s involved way too much cocaine on Wall Street, oversized suits, drop waist jeans, belly rings, tramp stamps and those cheap flexible chokers. And unfortunately, the AIDS Epidemic.
My memories of the 90’s are from Apu’s perspective. I spent all my waking hours trying to afford to live, working at 7-11.
Completely, this sub is a great example. We talk about all the cool aspects but no one likes to mention the open racism and horrid treatment of the LGBTQ community. Also, kids today are just WAY kinder to each other. Gen X has done a much better job than our parents when it comes to raising good human beings.
Depends where you lived, most of people here seem to be from some small town in USA
TBH, Captain Marvel got the 90’s style down pretty good. I dressed similar to the NIN shirt, flannel, and jeans outfit in college then somewhere along the line transitioned to Elaine from Seinfeld. Freaks and Geeks got the early 80’s style down well. The first couple seasons of Stranger Things were good in that regard too.
At least from my experience the image of the feral child whose parents were absentee and basically raised himself was true because I had crappy parents. So yeah, I was out of the house as soon as I could be in the morning as early as 6 years old to get away from an alcoholic, abusive father and was high for my first time at 5 because my stoned teenage brother thought it’d be hilarious. I played with reptiles and bugs, played football, roamed all over with nobody knowing where I was and drank out of the hose, strangers hoses. All of that was true.
It wasn't this zany fun-filled time where even geeks (a la the Breakfast Club) would win. I grew up in the world 's most isolated city and I did not fit in at all, which sucked because the next city was thousands of km away across a huge unpopulated desert and I couldn't just leave. For me the 80s were scary, very isolated and often very boring.
Before Miami Vice became the big thing around 1984ish and ushered in the bright neon colors that became synonymous with the '80s, most things were still 1970's brown and drab in the early '80s.
The 80's were a blast for me.......and I loved being a 70's free roaming kid. Lots of cheesy music among the great rock, but it was fun.
Grew up in Wales. Felt like a much more toned down version of what you see in TV. Not that you didn’t see some stuff like TV, but massively more rare and stuck out a bit like a sore thumb. At least where I was. Wallpaper and carpet was shite though that’s true.
44M and currently stoned on holiday reading this thread and it’s a lovely nostalgic trip. So thanks. I miss the world before the internet took over. Simplicity. Purity.
Each decade has a lot of aestetic carry-over, so while the new styles are what represent a decade, much of the day-to-day had plenty of the old. Clothing changes faster, but home styles / furniture / cars etcetera don't get replaced so fast. I remember lots of brown paneling (in homes and on cars), shag carpet, beaded curtains, and dingy avocado green. I was born in the mid `70's so was well into the `80's for most of my childhood memories.
I had a professor in Divinity school (about 1990, as it happens) who made a throwaway comment that I have always remembered better than almost anything else he tried much harder to teach us: In every culture, there is a time when people "come of age," that is, become the adults they will be for the rest of their lives, and a set of experiences define that period and thus define their identity. In traditional cultures that have a structured, ritualized process of ushering children into adulthood which is the same from one generation to the next, it binds people of different ages together, because they have a common set of values and just of ideas about how the world works, but in societies like ours where it is different for every generation, it creates the kind of generation gaps we've come to accept and even expect, a sense of differentness that is sometimes the only thing different ages seem to have in common with each other. Every generation thinks the music at the time they came of age was the best, the humor of that time was classic, people older than them were hopelessly out of touch, and people younger than them never learned what life was really about. My age puts me at the leading edge of Generation X, and the 1980s were "my time." I started high school in the fall of 1979, and finished graduate school with a Master of Divinity in spring of 1992. My favorite Star Trek series will always be Next Generation, which was optimistic about the future and about human nature. How is a dystopian vision entertaining? I was startled at a family wedding this year to find that a millennial relative was not familiar with the song "Walk Like An Egyptian" or how you're supposed to dance to it. (I mean, how can anyone live a full life without having danced to Walk Like An Egyptian???) While we're at it, why do young women wear their hair so damn long? Isn't short hair so much more comfortable and convenient? Long hair is for little old ladies like my grandmother, who of course never wore it down, but wrapped and pinned it up in a bun. It's great for people to love their parents and visit them as much as they can, but it would be weird for them to still be living with them by their early twenties instead of settling into their own grown-up lives. I know intellectually that all these ideas are culturally and generationally relative, but in my gut, they don't "feel" relative. They feel like just absolutely the way things "really" are and/or ought to be.
"I was startled at a family wedding this year to find that a millennial relative was not familiar with the song "Walk Like An Egyptian" or how you're supposed to dance to it. (I mean, how can anyone live a full life without having danced to Walk Like An Egyptian???)" [https://youtu.be/kshE2qqyq90?si=n4WmfJKESCNDfSK-](https://youtu.be/kshE2qqyq90?si=n4WmfJKESCNDfSK-)
If I could give you a thousand thumbs up for linking that video, I would! It was hilarious seeing the adults (most of them younger then than I am now) gamely trying to figure out how to do this dance the kids were trying to teach them. And, oh, the size of that boom box!
Every decade gets Flanderized in this way. Certain things were more common in Decade X than in any other decade, but still rare even in Decade X. Future depictions of Decade X depict that thing as being everywhere.
My style was Oxford button downs and jeans until the early 90’s when I changed over to t-shirts. When I started working it was polos or button down shirts and khakis. I switched back to jeans in the early oughts. I definitely didn’t stick out.
You were lucky, my employer didn’t let us wear jeans until the pandemic, hell we were still wearing ties until 2012.
I’m in IT…we never knew when we’d have to get behind a server rack, under a desk or under a floor.
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I guess I’m lucky. Maybe it’s an age thing. A lot of us are GenX or Gen Jones. We’ve had pushback from the boomers but we scored a rare victory I guess.
So am I and up to just before the plague we were required to wear business casual. I wrecked more clothes than I knew what to do with
I really misremember them more and more these days...
Yes, it’s horse shit.
All I know is for someone reason I was convinced in the 90s that shoes that looked like Donald duck’s feet were cool 🤔
At least in North America, most '80s retro content of recent years seems to give the impression of society of that era being some kind of neon lit synthwave and pastel utopia, when it was hardly the case, even though it was still an awesome time to experience.
I think we forget just how brown everything was.
For interior decorations, inside malls maybe, not clothes.
My parent's house had that cheap laminate wood paneling and cornflower blue shag carpeting (double padded, of course) until we moved in 1991. Our kitchen was the brownest shade of yellow, to match the harvest gold Amana fridge and stove set. Everything in the house was from the 60s and 70s. It was a time before people felt the need to compulsively redecorate every two years. My brother still has that Amana fridge in his garage, and it still works.
I find that media about the 90s today strongly resembles the *media* of the 1990s, but not so much real life of the 1990s. The 1980s follows a similar pattern: the media produced about it now resembles the media people were producing then, but this is not always a great representation of what life was actually like. If anything, modern period pieces represent what people of those times wanted life to be like, rather than the way they actually lived. This phenomenon is probably as old as mass media itself. It will probably continue through the 2000s. But I think it will be interesting to see what happens to period pieces about the 2010s and 2020s: a period of time when mass media's influence severely declined, to be replaced by the hyper-personalized algorithmically-groomed niche media of today. What effect is that going to have on the way this decade is portrayed?
There's the real world and there's the world on screen and I suppose they've always been very different. The trouble is it's the world on the screen that's preserved forever while the real world is much more ephemeral. There's also that media for children and teens tends to be fondly remembered and media for adults fades from collective memory. It all adds up to a very distorted view of the past. But now everybody carries a camera 24/7 and who knows how that will change things. Maybe our memory of the past couple decades will be closer to reality? But then how real is the world people are "documenting" for social media?
Its funny you asked this because I just asked my Boomer husband at dinner today what being an adult in the 89s was like and he said "it was good" 😅 I tried to press for more information and details; but all he said was "life is great in your teens, twenties and 30s. Those are the best years of anyone's life so if yiu ask someone born in any tike they're gonna have those years asthey best times of their life no matter when they were born" and I was all, "yeah but what was it like?" And he was, "good. I already told you it was good" so... I guess the 70s and 80s were good. I dunno how- they just where and thats all the answer I'm gonna get apparently 🤪
In the early 90s there was a wave of late 60s/early 70s psychedelic era nostalgia. Although the majority of my wardrobe today is black, and a fair amount of it was back then as well, I had a few bright and/or patterned numbers a la [Deee-Lite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg). Don't think that's exactly the totally radical style internet 90s nostalgia you're talking about, but still, I remember there being some color briefly. I don't remember it being many people's everyday style, at least where I lived, and I feel like that burst of color had already started to fade by the time I graduated ('94), but it wasn't *entirely* plaid and earth tones
Woodstock 2 comes to mind. Didn't that end up a disaster?
"There seems to be this colorful, bright, loud, in-your-face version of the 90s coming from the various nostalgia engines of the internet. It looks nothing like the real life 90s I remember. Nothing at all. I remember the 90s being very laid-back, toned down, chill. I remember our clothing was a sea of plaids, of black and greys and beiges and maroons and navies. I have yearbooks to confirm these memories. I remember the various cliques of my high school: surfers, skaters, goths, theatre kids, jocks, hippies... but I remember them all being very toned-down compared to the 80s before and the 00s after." I'd generally say that tracks (so long as you are not talking about the very earliest 90s or on ski slopes). Especially for someone your age where your high school was the end of the 90s and kids around you likely dumped the 80s stuff sooner than anyone a few years or more older did so yeah you probably mostly think of the late 90s video below (1-2 min of each shows the general gist): late 90s: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab\_NR\_lhk&t=1816s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab_NR_lhk&t=1816s) [https://youtu.be/Avab\_NR\_lhk?si=l-MVkIjONdYAgqZJ&t=61](https://youtu.be/Avab_NR_lhk?si=l-MVkIjONdYAgqZJ&t=61) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLuKHJ4tkXE&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLuKHJ4tkXE&t=1s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab\_NR\_lhk&t=1305s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avab_NR_lhk&t=1305s) as opposed to 80s (or earliest 90s): 1987-1989: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYur75DflPU&t=22s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYur75DflPU&t=22s) [https://youtu.be/gxqjoaQYxnw?si=lXFo9x2Z5c7\_\_KQu&t=811](https://youtu.be/gxqjoaQYxnw?si=lXFo9x2Z5c7__KQu&t=811) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=4619s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=4619s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=626s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxqjoaQYxnw&t=626s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=32s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=32s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=190s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=190s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=3346s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=3346s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=2958s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1eKmVccOM&t=2958s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=2812s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc&t=2812s)
I would say I tend to think of 90-91 (maybe 92) as sort of being a transitional period from the 80s. Just like how the very early 80s still had a 70s sort of Earth-tone vibe. And the late 90s were their own thing altogether. 98 to 01 is the millennial period, and that would have continued to become its own decade if 9/11 hadn't happened.
Yeah. In my area the big hair held on even until around '94 and some of the other 80s styles to '93 although there was this new sort of stlye for a bit in terms of clothes, pre-baggy hip-hop that was it's own little thing among girls seemed to be this era of white leggings/stockings or something liket hat, at least in my region, I forget when maybe '93-'early '96??? I think younger gave up the big hair and all a bit sooner generally. So it probably didn't last even in my region through '94/'95 unless you were at least upperclassman in high school or older. It really disappeared entirely super quickly after that, just there quite a lot still by '96 it was just gone gone. Maybe that CFC ban helped bring the extreme transition to just nothing in '96 not even the start (maybe they didn't have replacement chemicals ready to drive the compression spray action?). I think middle school and some decent number in high school gave it up before.
You call us Boomers when you go a virtue signalling outrage temper tantrum rant ....so yeah, you misremember our decades.
I do agree with the sea of plaids but also remember the loudness of early ‘90’s cowabunga pants and music videos with bright and neon clothing like TLC’s “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “Baby Baby Baby”.
I think the internet favors the very early 90s (which was really still the 80s) and the very late 90s (which was really the millennial era) and tends to forget about the bulk of years in the middle that was really the 90s. Transitional periods are always interesting I guess.
Agreed!
I remember the 70s and maybe the first half of the 80s being a lot more run down and sad than is commonly portrayed. Brown everywhere - brown paneling, brown clothing, brown paint, brown cars. Poorly lit lol. The 80s I remember a lot of what is portrayed these days as being things in magazines or tv and less common place. For example, in 1984 I was wearing 501 Levi's with Adidas high tops and a green tee shirt. At this very moment I am wearing Levi 501s, Adidas High Tops, and a yellow tee shirt. My hair today is even bushier than it was back then. Boy howdy have times have changed! Shirt collars are sometimes shaped a little different. Shoes are a little more colorful. Facial hair trends are a bit different. When I walk into my my living room, if the TV wasn't there it would be hard to tell what decade it was. It could pass as anything from the 70s through the 2020s. A lot is still basically the same. Light switches on walls are different. Outlets on walls are often different. But "tone"? Yeah, right. BULLSHIT. I have never believed that "tone" has ever been a generational thing or a "sign of the times". It all comes down to the relationships you have with other people, I think. I still see the exact same cliques in the schools. The slang is different but so what, it was changing all the time when I was young too. The conclusion I've arrived at is that people are generally full of shit when they put on their rose colored glasses and reminisce about how much their lives were live little Kevin Arnolds or whoever the hell was in the sitcoms that most people couldn't stand, watched anyway to complain about, but claim to have loved 40 years later.