Originally Posted By: Benzadmiral
I've noticed that many things about our lives here in the 21st century don't look much different from the mid-Nineties. Oh, sure, we have cell phones and laptop computers. But in the case of clothes and hairstyles, it's sort of hard to tell 1994 from 2014. In contrast, if you look at pics of people in the Sixties and Seventies, and even the Eighties, anybody who's got even a nodding acquaintance with those periods (let alone lived through 'em) will spot the decade right away. Cars too.
It's as if our clothing stopped evolving, but our technology went on. (Of course, when nearly everybody wears shorts and T-shirts 90% of the time, there's not much style there to evolve.)
I agree that 1990s-2010s styles can be hard to tell apart. The technology is the major difference. It's usually the computers and phones in 1990s movies that look old more than anything else. Furniture, buildings, clothing, etc. aren't vastly different from today. Sometimes police cars date the movie, since few departments used boxy Caprices and LTDs after the late 1990s.
I remember in the early 1990s, a late 1970s vehicle seemed old, and seemed drastically different from current cars, almost a classic but not quite. In 1993, the Ford Mustang had only been around for 29 years, but was already a full blown collector car and had already reached its icon status. Same for Tri Five Chevy cars...those were all the rage in the 1980s when they were only 30 years old.
A 1984 car will get my attention somewhat, but isn't a really unusual sight, and many of the ones I see are still in unrestored, daily driver condition. Usually primered up pickups, sometimes cars with the landau top peeling off. They do look old, but aren't the head turners that a 1950s car would have been in the 1980s. Even though almost half of 1990s cars are 20 years old or older now, they really don't seem that old. Plenty are dented and scraped up, but they are still a common sight here, and few would call a 1990s vehicle a classic except for maybe an Impala SS or something.
It's still weird to see the 1990s stuff starting to age though. I remember when the 1997 F-150 came out in 1996. The rounded styling was love it or hate it, and I remember some people (usually older) going out and buying boxy 1996 models specifically because they didn't want the new "spaceship" or "jellybean" F-150. My cousin bought two 1998s, and I remember how new and different it was for a pickup to have a third door and 6-disc CD changer. Ford built huge numbers of those trucks (nearly a million a year) up through 2003 and a small run in 2004. Now the newest trucks with that body style that was so controversial are 10 years old, the oldest 17! Hard to believe those trucks are almost 20 now, and hard to believe the body style that came after has now been around for a decade.
Seems like time flies sometimes.