1940s-1950s
Art Deco is sacred in my house
1960s-1970s
Midcentury Medieval
Whatever the hell was going on at The Gobbler
Interior Desecrations: God bless James Lileks for catching some of the fugliest styles known to man....
1980s
Pastel Southwestern, babey!
If Art deco is sacred, Goth is Gospel round these parts, pardner.
1990s
Festival Marketplace
Frasurbane
Utopian Scholastic
Whimsigothic
A slightly longer look at Whimsigothic
Whimsicraft
2000s-2020s
Soft Colonial Wanderlust
Synthwave
Liminal Spaces
You're home sick in the 90s and your mom is cleaning.....You're a wealthy divorcee watching the weather channel in the 90s....You're 10 and it's a spring day and why doesn't the world look like this anymore?
Lately I've been enjoying these hyper specific Instagram and Youtube shorts (the first 2 in the subtitle are pretty much Retro.Avocado captions: https://www.tiktok.com/@retro.avocado). I'm no stranger to liking old things, so this shouldn't be surprising. I'm also at a great crossroads: 40 years old and terminally online. I am old enough to remember both life without the everpresent net and the welcome thirdspace it turned into in my teen years. It's why I'm on this friggin' site, after all!
But oh man does it give me a *Mood* to feel so fulfilled seeing memes and clips like Retro.Avocado's, or throwbacks to 80s/90s life. I've been enamored with vaporwave for a whil, and my internet habits have led me to Japanese City pop as well as into a landslide of Hall and Oates(1).
Am I sad? Somewhat. Am I nostalgic? Of course? Am I mad? Probably. I don't think a single generation has ever had 100% serious and profound memories. You know, the kind that are untouched by trends and memes (2). Sure, memetic culture worked different before the internet, but you cannot tell me a 20-something in medieval Europe didn't get ~The Feels~ hearing a no longer fashionable song sung at the market or that a 30 year old in the 1920s didn't let out a little sigh seeing adverts from their teens.
Thanks to the worldwide web, I can now dial up whatever mood (vibe) and memory strikes me and indulge. The fact that so many of them are related to things like advertising and corporate design does give me a bit of pause. So many are related to products. Take the seashell soaps that "everyone" had in their bath in the 90s. We had them, dust gathered and all. I can recall those things clearer than my mother's face. Why is that? (3)
On one hand, vapor-stuff and related chrono-memes make me yearn for a simpler time, but it's also a time when I was just there. Just being, without the pocket panopticons that we know and love. Yes, surveillance happened in those days, but it's not like we handed over our data in buckets the way we (myself included) do now.I also like the absorption I get into these memes, vibes, and images. I can dwell on them for a while. I can focus. This is no small feat for me. I genuinely don't know if I have ADD or if it's just a response to living as we do today, with our minds split between daily life and the idea of doom that seems to be creeping in from all sides.
____________(1) It's great fun to play the entire track for my GenZ co-workers, as opposed to the 15-second "audio"....WHAT I WANT, YOU GOT, AND IT MIGHT BE HARD TO HANDLE....#dyinginside #latestagecapitalism
(2) no shit they had serious memories, personal and cultural. Trauma comes to mind. Wars, famines, etc. But humans are human and we get fascinated by the silliest things as well as the most profound.
(3) I can answer myself.....the soap doesn't have related trauma, duh.