With the popularity of Stranger Things, “The Girl” has been watching 80s music videos recently and it made me aware of a trend I hadn’t noticed before now: most of these music videos and movies had heavy industrial themes. There’s an incongruity in seeing musicians playing “instruments of the future” (synthesizers) while surrounded by the decaying infrastructure of the past (steel mills, factories) and clad in heavy leather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BTW: obsessive pattern recognition and having a need to info dump when new facts are learned seem like evidence of “undiagnosed autism”, but wife insists I only have “fake autism” and that, “everyone just wants to have autism now because it’s trendy on social media.” Either way, investigating the “why” behind this aesthetic with the help of AI was a fun diversion and you, dear reader, get to see the fruits of it. This trend, it turns out, wasn’t random: it was a “Man vs. Machine” narrative. Google’s AI suggested leather was “urban armor”; a visual metaphor for the synthesis of the human operator and the industrial soundscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This got me thinking about the oscillation of fashion trends over the last four decades. We appear to be trapped in a cycle between High Gloss and Matte finishes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Funny enough, my wife and I live this oscillation on the daily. While I view the current resurgence of leather and synthetic textures as a functional aesthetic for a digital age, my wife sees it as “flamboyant” and “cheap.” I feel like this is a fun example of what happens at the larger societal scale with these fads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years ago, we were going through Disney Channel movies of our childhood and watched 1999s Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century<\/em>. We both thought it was a fun movie filled with nostalgia, but she watched it and saw low-budget costume design and aluminum foil but I saw “space pants.” That aesthetic signals competence, professionalism, and preparedness for a hostile environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gemini has this theory that our current “Shiny Revival” (my phrase) in the 2020s is driven by hardware. In the 2000s, high-definition (Blu-ray) drove a trend toward gritty realism because we could finally see the texture of dirt. Today, the primary consumption device is the OLED smartphone screen, which favors high contrast and saturation to trigger a dopamine loop. “Matte” looks dull on a phone; “Shiny” gets people to stop scrolling. I can buy that but that’s just one factor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, our societal media is governed by the demographics of the current “creative class” making movies and music. The Gen X and Millennial creative directors are engaging in “fan service” for their own youth, utilizing modern budgets to recreate the optimistic futurism we were promised but never received. Gemini reminded me that a Gen X writer or producer is making stories with characters based on “the cool kid” from when they were 11 years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I may never convince my wife that a rockin’ leather jacket is anything but a mid-life crisis costume, but I’m sticking with the idea that we are dressing for the timeline we wish we were in. Now is this timeline “Star Trek” or “Mad Max”?<\/p>\n