Male preferences have gradually moved out of the real world into the virtual world as America was taken over by female preferences; the virtual world is not colorless, however--the tendency in computer games, for example, is to reproduce splendid vivid colors & values of light, has been for decades! So goodbye to all the flamboyant colors on muscle cars. Goodbye to the muscle cars, really. But even the children will be obsessed with vivid colors in the most vulgar way--Fortnite, Minecraft.
But the younger generation of men seems to be reversing the trend of stern minimalism or colorlessness. I spend quite a bit of time in DC & I can tell you the suitings are getting more flamboyant. Brown shoes with blue suits came in after COVID, but so did checks. Bright blue suits, too, instead of navy. More color in the shirts. It's becoming more common to have other colors than navy or gray on suits--at any political gathering on the right, which is where the young men are, somebody will look dandified.
So also, facial hair is back in--the basic assertion of male difference is everywhere, even in Europe, though more so in America. Mustaches, too--like the '70s.
Ordinary boys are now wearing their hair, curled or ruffled, over their foreheads. As always, it's a fashion, but in this case, a sign of defiant sensitivity in opposition to the previous generation.
Pete Hegseth must be the most dandified-dressing Secretary of War in US history, as well as the most dandified dresser in any 21st century Presidential cabinet.
> the virtual world is not colorless, however--the tendency in computer games, for example, is to reproduce splendid vivid colors & values of light, has been for decades!
Well, it has been for 𝘰𝘯𝘦 decade, perhaps. Before then there was a huge upswelling of outrage, among video game consumers, over the fashion in video games for not using any colors other than brown, and maybe gray.
Here's an article defending the idea that it's sometimes OK to use exclusively grey and brown, depending on the theme of your work: "In Defence of Grey and Brown" https://www.gamesradar.com/defence-grey-and-brown/
I grew up in a house with lime green shag carpeting and bright purple cabinets in the kitchen. Andy Warhol posters on the wall. I really hate the HGTV beige look.
So did I. There were also a lot of harvest golds and avocado greens around. When I get my page going here I have a set of pictures to post called "My Psychedelic Childhood."
Poor Doug Sanders! Had a 3 footer to beat Nicklaus at St Andrews for the Open. Hit it so poorly that he tried to rake the ball back to him as if he was on the putting green. Lost 18 hole playoff the next day by 1 shot. Yikes. I’m glad he was a hit w the ladies. Also was supposed to be on golfer Tony Lema’s private jet that crashed back in 1966.
Earth-tone colors are less divisive and appeal to a broader potential customer base when selling your home. Perhaps this is indicative of people being more aware that their current house is a stepping stone to their next house, and a brightly-colored home turns many buyers away at first sight?
The silver car thing drives me crazy. My office looks over a busy intersection in Chicago, and when I see cars waiting at the light, I often feel like I'm watching an old black-and-white television set. Most of the cars are gray, with a few blacks and whites sprinkled in. Borrrrring.
I’ve found life is a lot simpler if all of your clothes are in the khaki/navy blue/Oxford blue family….maybe some pale yellow tossed in for variety. Everything goes together. You can dress in the dark without fear of a fashion faux-pas.
These clothes also coordinate well with a Golden Retriever, the official dog of the gentrified. My house? Weathered cedar shingles, of course!
Jack Nicklaus is red-green colorblind, so in the 1960s when color TV was spreading and golf fashions were colorful, he'd sometimes show up on a Sunday dressed in red pants and a green shirt, looking like one of Santa's elves.
Being Jack, he quickly worked out some system so that wouldn't happen again.
Some house-color choices involve regional surroundings and taste. In Sarasota, you will find magnificent orange and yellow houses right on the gulf. There’s no graffiti though.
A new house went up near me. While it was being built it was a canary yellow. Looked pretty good. Sadly they just painted it white and my wife complained about how boring it is.
The only gay man I associate with golf is Johnny Mathis, who apparently was is totally crazy about it and has a very low handicap. Having attended my first pro golf event this year, it was interesting to see up close how much most of these guys and the fans look so similar in physique and dress - if you randomly grabbed 10 spectators and 10 players and had someone with zero knowledge of the pro game pick out which were the pros, I would guess that they would be correct a bit more than half the time but not much more.
Golf attire is still pretty colorful and the men who wear it are extremely straight looking and tend to look pretty fit to sort of dad bod. These guys are/think of themselves as winners. In contrast, urban young men seem to look either scrawny or really out of shape for their age, and they tend towards really muted colors, which is not a mark of confidence and lets them blend in rather than stand out.
For homes the grayscale decor fad had quite a run, from more contemporary homes to the modern farmhouse look. One thing I have noticed in the upper income suburbs where I live is that this is still popular with large high end new homes but in developments that are going for a more village feel there are plenty of homes with varied colors, which could be the developer’s preference or the locality mandating a wider range of looks. However I think the grayscale look is totally over for remodels and flips - there is one for sale in my neighborhood and it has sat for months whereas the norm is for homes to sell immediately.
One of my interests is formerly-famous old people and Johnny Mathis qualifies as he is turning 90 next month. My ace in the hole for this category used to be Peter Marshall but we lost him last year at 98. I suppose Dick Van Dyke qualifies as 99 but he is cheating because he was SO famous; I prefer to mention people who haven't been thought about in 25 years like Herb Alpert who turned 90 in March. Between Mathis and Alpert you would have quite a record collection, especially since Alpert made much more money as an executive than as a performer. As an aside despite his name and appearance Alpert is Jewish
I used to scour the charity shops for old records. Some bins seemed like 80% Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He must have been huge at one time. Other weird artifacts of immense popularity--any kind of Christmas Album and a musical called something like "First Family" that might have been about the Kennedys
When Herb was big he would outsell the Beatles; Whipped Cream & Other Delights sold six million copies.
First Family is a notoriously famous album that wasn't a musical but rather a Vaughn Meader comedy album in which he would do Kennedy impersonations. This album was so popular and well-regarded that it won the Grammy for Best Album of 1962. The sequel came out the following spring and was also successful, but sadly Meader's career ended on November 22, 1963
Comedy albums were popular with my older cousins in the 1960s. I can recall hearing Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby in the 1960s from them. I think I owned a used copy of the Vaughn Meader album.
The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart was great. Also loved Bill Cosby. One of his albums had a bit in which young Bill had to take a note home from school and his father demanded "What is that? READ THAT TO ME." and then Bill tried to get out of trouble by telling his dad that the teacher called him a name and said his father was a nothing because he worked at the city dump.
One candidate might be Johnny Carson’s bandleader Doc Severinsen, who’s now 98. Although he did some touring until a few years ago he wasn’t really a major celebrity since retiring from The Tonight Show more than 30 years ago.
For someone outside of show biz, there 99-year-old Alan Greenspan.
Yes, both of those qualify as they were legitimately famous but haven't been thought about in almost 20 years at this point, and probably over 30 for Doc
There was a lot of popular music in the '60s aimed at mostly adult audiences that is today forgotten. It's too bad because a lot of it, including Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, is good fun to listen to. It's also more evocative of the real 1960s that ordinary Americans experienced at the time (not the Hollywood History version of "the Sixties, man!") than most of the stuff that people today imagine everyone listened to back then.
The irony of this was that when these albums were first released, there was no Tijuana Brass; it was just Herb playing all the instruments and he mixed them into songs. The albums were so popular that he decided to go on tour, so he had to put together a backing band to actually play the songs.
It is probably common knowledge that Herb was a wildly successful recording executive as one of the founders of A&M. His partner Jerry Moss died two years ago at 88
In general yes. But not in my neighborhood - this is the only house I can think of that has stayed on the market for more than a few days for years. But it’s a flip where some guy bought it, renovated it in this style, and it’s just sat. Meanwhile multiple houses have gone on the market and sold.
I believe it. We renovated our house a few years ago and stayed the hell away from anything like that. Stuck with warmer colors, brass hardware that would age, stained our floors darker than they were, even the hood over the range isn’t modern looking or metal.
At a PGA Tour event, I've found that if you go the practice area on a tournament day, there's only one way to tell the players from the caddies: the caddies are allowed to wear shorts, but the players have to wear pants. (I believe Steve has pointed out previously that a lot of the caddies are pretty good players and former college golf teammates of the touring pros.) It's quite a drastic difference from being close up to pro or major college basketball or football players, who are almost always incredibly large compared to the average human.
I was at a LIV event so the golfers could wear shorts. DJ, Rahm, and DeChambeau were impressively sized humans. The rest were pretty average, include a bunch of Asian guys I had never heard of. That said, I was at a par 3 and they were all very accurate on their tee shots. The differentiator was their putting,
Rory definitely went the Tiger Woods route and really got into weight training. Although it helps with power I wonder if being overly muscled impacts touch, as it seems to do with quarterbacks.
As a young man, I met a bunch of the Aussie cricket team (a sport that doesn't obviously reward size in the way basketball, or American football do) in a social situation. As a group, it was noticeable how much more robust than anyone else they were but individually they likely wouldn't have stood out in the same way (probably because they varied so much in height).
Not only can I not imagine any current golfer dressing like that -- even on the Ladies' PGA tour -- the only living human being I CAN imagine dressing like Doug Sanders in 1969 is Fred Schneider of the B-52's.
The boring car colors are so sad! My grandmother had a turquoise car with a light grey interior which I still remember fondly. WHen I bought my current car, I had the choice of two silvers, white or black.
Both my husband and I love bright , flamboyant shirts. They make people smile.
Yes, bought my wife a new SUV this year and it was white, black or grey for the trim level she wanted. My vehicle (a truck) does come in a few eye catching colors and I bought one that has a cool color although it’s more of a throwback to the 70s/80s tone than bright. The only brightly colored new car I have seen recently was when I had to drive a Chevy Spark rental for a week that was the color of a blue M&M. My kids made me drive them to school in it so their friends could point and laugh.
Mazda sells a lots of cars in a color they call "Soul Red". It's a dark metallic red, but it glows like a ruby in sunlight. It's very pretty. They also have an attractive dark blue that's definitely blue, not almost-black. Then, today, I saw a new Toyota Highlander in dark green, a color I haven't seen on the roads in years.
I think color is creeping back onto the roads, but it's true that light colors other than white, off white (aka "pearl") or silver are nowhere to be seen.
My second car, in the 80s, was a dark, metallic green. I liked it (although I admit I bought it because it was affordable) and it was easy to find in the parking lot.
Toyota definitely has some great colors for their trucks and SUVs. I have always liked dark green but for awhile it seemed no one was offering that. One of the SUVs we considered for my wife was halfway because it was available in that color although ultimately we went with a different vehicle because it had more room.
Obviously a problem with bright or bold colors is that when they go out of fashion they make things look extra dated. There were a bunch of mid rise apartments built in the 2010s that used colorful cement fiber board all over the place and already look sort of odd.
I call them "lunar colors." They've been in style since the 80s, but I don't think this will go on much longer. People have been complaining about it for at least a couple years.
With cars, was there perhaps just one fashion cycle away from sober colors as the demographics of car ownership increased rapidly in the mid-60s to 70s, and then back to the Schelling point of sober kitchen appliance colors Henry Ford would have approved of?
During the Apollo missions, abstract painter Mark Rothko started painting two color canvases that were black for the top half and gray for the bottom half that looked almost exactly like then famous view from lunar orbit.
You got me to thinking about this stuff in your posts about the lunar photography. I realized that much of the latest fashion and style during my childhood in the 80s featured these white, silver, grey and beige tones that call the Apollo photography to mind. From Star Wars to office buildings to Apple computers, it was all over the place -- even on my toys and bikes.
I think it's on its last legs as I've noticed people complaining about the lack of color in contemporary art and architecture.
My dad was a big fan of Rosey Grier, the NFLer who also published Knitting For Men. Not confirming to sex role stereotypes was not invented in 2015🙄, nor even by David Bowie!
All the grey: abstraction is in, AI tech is the highest status job, the highest concepts are mathematical not aesthetic or religious. Strivers want to display they are operating in a realm where pretty colors are irrelevant.
Finally: are you running an experiment to see the sex ratios of comments on your MVP posts to your fashion posts?
The most vividly colored blockbuster of the last 20 years was probably the post-transition Wachowskis “Speed Racer”, which bombed. Anyway, in comparison to the washed-out “Matrix” look the brothers/sisters seemed to get a lot more into color after they started taking lots of estrogen. What means?
I'm a professional Visual Designer. I've spent 3 decades now presenting designs for review, and from my experience I've noticed that men seem to respond more to shape/composition, and women to color. When a man gives feedback to "make it pop" more, he'll suggest making the text bolder or CTA button larger. When a woman gives feedback she'll suggest making the text or CTA button a brighter color ("more noticeable"). My pet theory is that our male ancestors needed to be good at identifying the shape of a bison on the horizon, and our female ancestors had to be good at identifying subtle colors of different edible plants (so they wouldn't poison the tribe by mistake), and the brighter colors of fruits - this influenced evolution and we still retain these traits today. Anyway, that's my theory. Not sure it would apply to the Wachowskis, however (even after they became sisters)
One area of design that has definitely not grown less colorful in recent years is book design — books becoming more and more female-dominated. So that suggests the garish 1970s as perhaps the peak of female interior decorating power, when women had more purchasing power but the married family was still considered the norm. As the public culture has become more egalitarian and marriage has declined car and home colors have thus become more neutral.
What I found especially odd is MacDonald's restaurants going from a red-orange-yellow color scheme to a muted grey-beige look. When driving a car full of hungry kids, you used to be able to spot a MacDonalds half a mile away, and now you might drive right past one assuming it's an accountant's office.
The colors on cars now have names like Harbor Grey, Rhino, Smoke, and Pewter to denote the subtle differences in gray. In recent years there's been a trend for flat grays on cars, which seem like a safety hazard--in rainy weather, they blend right in with the wet pavement.
Any McDonald's with the old color scheme would have been grandfathered in. On occasion you will see a new one in a shopping center where they have to conform to an outside color scheme but that's the exception, not the rule
McDonald's red and yellow connote meat and grain. Like the tortilla, the hamburger bun embodies the sun, and the yellow arches are the trail of the sun rising and setting.
Blame it on Gaines family, HGTV, and interior design influencers. Houses are designed to be sold instead of lived in. When watching such redecorating shows it becomes obvious that day to day living is not a concern. The designers talk more about entertaining than where will the iPad and iPhone be plugged in.
I agree and think it's nuts--the idea that you would do something different to your home for the benefit of potential future owners? When I bought my first condo, it had one of those skeuomorphic fireplaces. I said "that's obviously where my big TV goes. I shall rip that fake out by the roots!" My mom was horrified. "You can't do that! You need a fireplace for resale!"
Even if the next buyer didn't want a fireplace, they too would never buy a place without one because of resale.
A few years ago I bought my first house and the living room had an oversized fireplace taking up one of the corners. It made the room impossible to arrange.
I had it destroyed and hauled away, bought a three seat sofa--that now fit in the room--and I am amazed every day that no previous owner thought to do it.
Male preferences have gradually moved out of the real world into the virtual world as America was taken over by female preferences; the virtual world is not colorless, however--the tendency in computer games, for example, is to reproduce splendid vivid colors & values of light, has been for decades! So goodbye to all the flamboyant colors on muscle cars. Goodbye to the muscle cars, really. But even the children will be obsessed with vivid colors in the most vulgar way--Fortnite, Minecraft.
But the younger generation of men seems to be reversing the trend of stern minimalism or colorlessness. I spend quite a bit of time in DC & I can tell you the suitings are getting more flamboyant. Brown shoes with blue suits came in after COVID, but so did checks. Bright blue suits, too, instead of navy. More color in the shirts. It's becoming more common to have other colors than navy or gray on suits--at any political gathering on the right, which is where the young men are, somebody will look dandified.
So also, facial hair is back in--the basic assertion of male difference is everywhere, even in Europe, though more so in America. Mustaches, too--like the '70s.
Ordinary boys are now wearing their hair, curled or ruffled, over their foreheads. As always, it's a fashion, but in this case, a sign of defiant sensitivity in opposition to the previous generation.
Most of this stuff is post-COVID.
Pete Hegseth must be the most dandified-dressing Secretary of War in US history, as well as the most dandified dresser in any 21st century Presidential cabinet.
Thank you for saying "Secretary of War".
> the virtual world is not colorless, however--the tendency in computer games, for example, is to reproduce splendid vivid colors & values of light, has been for decades!
Well, it has been for 𝘰𝘯𝘦 decade, perhaps. Before then there was a huge upswelling of outrage, among video game consumers, over the fashion in video games for not using any colors other than brown, and maybe gray.
Here's a retrospective video: "Remember when every game was brown?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qQIhIOaiY4
Here's an article defending the idea that it's sometimes OK to use exclusively grey and brown, depending on the theme of your work: "In Defence of Grey and Brown" https://www.gamesradar.com/defence-grey-and-brown/
Here's a comic making fun of the trend: https://vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222
Here's a satirical interview "with" the developers of Fallout: New Vegas: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=8316
Quote:
> What about the visuals? Is the game still going to be pervasively, monotonously brown, so brown that the player will wish to be struck blind?
> Yes.
-----
Since this fashion has already been tossed on the dungheap of history, we can make some observations:
- It was not driven by consumer demand.
- Consumers were quite outspoken about how much they hated it.
- Producers were not bothered by this. They used exclusively brown despite knowing that their customers hated it.
I grew up in a house with lime green shag carpeting and bright purple cabinets in the kitchen. Andy Warhol posters on the wall. I really hate the HGTV beige look.
So did I. There were also a lot of harvest golds and avocado greens around. When I get my page going here I have a set of pictures to post called "My Psychedelic Childhood."
I wrote an essay on colour grading and psychological warfare last year. You should definitely read it.
Poor Doug Sanders! Had a 3 footer to beat Nicklaus at St Andrews for the Open. Hit it so poorly that he tried to rake the ball back to him as if he was on the putting green. Lost 18 hole playoff the next day by 1 shot. Yikes. I’m glad he was a hit w the ladies. Also was supposed to be on golfer Tony Lema’s private jet that crashed back in 1966.
Earth-tone colors are less divisive and appeal to a broader potential customer base when selling your home. Perhaps this is indicative of people being more aware that their current house is a stepping stone to their next house, and a brightly-colored home turns many buyers away at first sight?
The silver car thing drives me crazy. My office looks over a busy intersection in Chicago, and when I see cars waiting at the light, I often feel like I'm watching an old black-and-white television set. Most of the cars are gray, with a few blacks and whites sprinkled in. Borrrrring.
People under fifty don't even know that there was a time when cars were fun.
I was saddened that the VW GTI 380 SE I wanted last year was available only in flat gray. Bought it anyway.
I’ve found life is a lot simpler if all of your clothes are in the khaki/navy blue/Oxford blue family….maybe some pale yellow tossed in for variety. Everything goes together. You can dress in the dark without fear of a fashion faux-pas.
These clothes also coordinate well with a Golden Retriever, the official dog of the gentrified. My house? Weathered cedar shingles, of course!
Why would you dress in the dark? 🤔
power outage? I think he just means that he doesn't have to think about it. Einstein and Steve Jobs took the idea to extremes--one outfit.
I dress in the (semi)dark a lot. I'm an early riser, my wife is a late sleeper.
Having a lazy wife is not something I would brag about, but you do you
Maybe lazy but certainly a lot smarter than somebody who can't think of a reason that somebody wouldn't turn the lights on in their bedroom.
Oh, I thought of plenty of reasons, just all of them make you look like a r3tard so I was curious which one you would go with
LOL, you apparently know nothing about women.
Jack Nicklaus is red-green colorblind, so in the 1960s when color TV was spreading and golf fashions were colorful, he'd sometimes show up on a Sunday dressed in red pants and a green shirt, looking like one of Santa's elves.
Being Jack, he quickly worked out some system so that wouldn't happen again.
That's one big ol' elf
Some house-color choices involve regional surroundings and taste. In Sarasota, you will find magnificent orange and yellow houses right on the gulf. There’s no graffiti though.
A new house went up near me. While it was being built it was a canary yellow. Looked pretty good. Sadly they just painted it white and my wife complained about how boring it is.
The only gay man I associate with golf is Johnny Mathis, who apparently was is totally crazy about it and has a very low handicap. Having attended my first pro golf event this year, it was interesting to see up close how much most of these guys and the fans look so similar in physique and dress - if you randomly grabbed 10 spectators and 10 players and had someone with zero knowledge of the pro game pick out which were the pros, I would guess that they would be correct a bit more than half the time but not much more.
Golf attire is still pretty colorful and the men who wear it are extremely straight looking and tend to look pretty fit to sort of dad bod. These guys are/think of themselves as winners. In contrast, urban young men seem to look either scrawny or really out of shape for their age, and they tend towards really muted colors, which is not a mark of confidence and lets them blend in rather than stand out.
For homes the grayscale decor fad had quite a run, from more contemporary homes to the modern farmhouse look. One thing I have noticed in the upper income suburbs where I live is that this is still popular with large high end new homes but in developments that are going for a more village feel there are plenty of homes with varied colors, which could be the developer’s preference or the locality mandating a wider range of looks. However I think the grayscale look is totally over for remodels and flips - there is one for sale in my neighborhood and it has sat for months whereas the norm is for homes to sell immediately.
One of my interests is formerly-famous old people and Johnny Mathis qualifies as he is turning 90 next month. My ace in the hole for this category used to be Peter Marshall but we lost him last year at 98. I suppose Dick Van Dyke qualifies as 99 but he is cheating because he was SO famous; I prefer to mention people who haven't been thought about in 25 years like Herb Alpert who turned 90 in March. Between Mathis and Alpert you would have quite a record collection, especially since Alpert made much more money as an executive than as a performer. As an aside despite his name and appearance Alpert is Jewish
I used to scour the charity shops for old records. Some bins seemed like 80% Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He must have been huge at one time. Other weird artifacts of immense popularity--any kind of Christmas Album and a musical called something like "First Family" that might have been about the Kennedys
When Herb was big he would outsell the Beatles; Whipped Cream & Other Delights sold six million copies.
First Family is a notoriously famous album that wasn't a musical but rather a Vaughn Meader comedy album in which he would do Kennedy impersonations. This album was so popular and well-regarded that it won the Grammy for Best Album of 1962. The sequel came out the following spring and was also successful, but sadly Meader's career ended on November 22, 1963
Comedy albums were popular with my older cousins in the 1960s. I can recall hearing Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby in the 1960s from them. I think I owned a used copy of the Vaughn Meader album.
My parents were cool, so Lenny Bruce was my Raffi.
The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart was great. Also loved Bill Cosby. One of his albums had a bit in which young Bill had to take a note home from school and his father demanded "What is that? READ THAT TO ME." and then Bill tried to get out of trouble by telling his dad that the teacher called him a name and said his father was a nothing because he worked at the city dump.
Ah. I'd say I'm sorry I never grabbed a copy, but that sounds like comedy that wouldn't hold up.
One candidate might be Johnny Carson’s bandleader Doc Severinsen, who’s now 98. Although he did some touring until a few years ago he wasn’t really a major celebrity since retiring from The Tonight Show more than 30 years ago.
For someone outside of show biz, there 99-year-old Alan Greenspan.
Yes, both of those qualify as they were legitimately famous but haven't been thought about in almost 20 years at this point, and probably over 30 for Doc
I think Johnny Mathis was doing concerts up until a year or two ago.
"A real showman knows how to disappear in the spotlight."
Before yesterday I could have said Jerry Adler as well. He was 96
I never hear Herb Alpert's music anywhere, which is striking because of how popular it once was.
But at UCLA, I see a big building with the name Herb Alpert School of Music, so his name will endure in that way.
He is certainly underrated.
There was a lot of popular music in the '60s aimed at mostly adult audiences that is today forgotten. It's too bad because a lot of it, including Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, is good fun to listen to. It's also more evocative of the real 1960s that ordinary Americans experienced at the time (not the Hollywood History version of "the Sixties, man!") than most of the stuff that people today imagine everyone listened to back then.
> Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass
The irony of this was that when these albums were first released, there was no Tijuana Brass; it was just Herb playing all the instruments and he mixed them into songs. The albums were so popular that he decided to go on tour, so he had to put together a backing band to actually play the songs.
It is probably common knowledge that Herb was a wildly successful recording executive as one of the founders of A&M. His partner Jerry Moss died two years ago at 88
He is in the midst of a tour. I saw him play on his 90th birthday earlier this year.
Homes are sitting in general these days.
In general yes. But not in my neighborhood - this is the only house I can think of that has stayed on the market for more than a few days for years. But it’s a flip where some guy bought it, renovated it in this style, and it’s just sat. Meanwhile multiple houses have gone on the market and sold.
Every interior designer on social media is now screaming against gray; gray floors in particular. Definitely over done.
I believe it. We renovated our house a few years ago and stayed the hell away from anything like that. Stuck with warmer colors, brass hardware that would age, stained our floors darker than they were, even the hood over the range isn’t modern looking or metal.
At a PGA Tour event, I've found that if you go the practice area on a tournament day, there's only one way to tell the players from the caddies: the caddies are allowed to wear shorts, but the players have to wear pants. (I believe Steve has pointed out previously that a lot of the caddies are pretty good players and former college golf teammates of the touring pros.) It's quite a drastic difference from being close up to pro or major college basketball or football players, who are almost always incredibly large compared to the average human.
Rory McIlroy, who maybe is the most famous golfer since Tiger Woods, is around 5'8". He was the second longest driver on tour this year.
I was at a LIV event so the golfers could wear shorts. DJ, Rahm, and DeChambeau were impressively sized humans. The rest were pretty average, include a bunch of Asian guys I had never heard of. That said, I was at a par 3 and they were all very accurate on their tee shots. The differentiator was their putting,
I went to the 2004 US Open and came away with the idea that 2/3 of star golfers were big (6' and over and 190 pounds and over).
But then I went to the 2018 US Open and they seemed not as big.
At the 2023 US Open, Rory McIlroy walked 3 feet away from me on his way into the clubhouse. Definitely not tall but very powerful looking.
Rory definitely went the Tiger Woods route and really got into weight training. Although it helps with power I wonder if being overly muscled impacts touch, as it seems to do with quarterbacks.
As a young man, I met a bunch of the Aussie cricket team (a sport that doesn't obviously reward size in the way basketball, or American football do) in a social situation. As a group, it was noticeable how much more robust than anyone else they were but individually they likely wouldn't have stood out in the same way (probably because they varied so much in height).
Not only can I not imagine any current golfer dressing like that -- even on the Ladies' PGA tour -- the only living human being I CAN imagine dressing like Doug Sanders in 1969 is Fred Schneider of the B-52's.
Paula Creamer is famous for wearing pink, but I'm not sure if she has ever worn an all-pink outfit.
Who is John Daly?
The boring car colors are so sad! My grandmother had a turquoise car with a light grey interior which I still remember fondly. WHen I bought my current car, I had the choice of two silvers, white or black.
Both my husband and I love bright , flamboyant shirts. They make people smile.
Yes, bought my wife a new SUV this year and it was white, black or grey for the trim level she wanted. My vehicle (a truck) does come in a few eye catching colors and I bought one that has a cool color although it’s more of a throwback to the 70s/80s tone than bright. The only brightly colored new car I have seen recently was when I had to drive a Chevy Spark rental for a week that was the color of a blue M&M. My kids made me drive them to school in it so their friends could point and laugh.
Mazda sells a lots of cars in a color they call "Soul Red". It's a dark metallic red, but it glows like a ruby in sunlight. It's very pretty. They also have an attractive dark blue that's definitely blue, not almost-black. Then, today, I saw a new Toyota Highlander in dark green, a color I haven't seen on the roads in years.
I think color is creeping back onto the roads, but it's true that light colors other than white, off white (aka "pearl") or silver are nowhere to be seen.
Agree that Mazda red is stunning. A bit like candy apple on some of the classic restorations, but deeper.
My second car, in the 80s, was a dark, metallic green. I liked it (although I admit I bought it because it was affordable) and it was easy to find in the parking lot.
Toyota definitely has some great colors for their trucks and SUVs. I have always liked dark green but for awhile it seemed no one was offering that. One of the SUVs we considered for my wife was halfway because it was available in that color although ultimately we went with a different vehicle because it had more room.
Obviously a problem with bright or bold colors is that when they go out of fashion they make things look extra dated. There were a bunch of mid rise apartments built in the 2010s that used colorful cement fiber board all over the place and already look sort of odd.
I call them "lunar colors." They've been in style since the 80s, but I don't think this will go on much longer. People have been complaining about it for at least a couple years.
With cars, was there perhaps just one fashion cycle away from sober colors as the demographics of car ownership increased rapidly in the mid-60s to 70s, and then back to the Schelling point of sober kitchen appliance colors Henry Ford would have approved of?
During the Apollo missions, abstract painter Mark Rothko started painting two color canvases that were black for the top half and gray for the bottom half that looked almost exactly like then famous view from lunar orbit.
Then he killed himself.
You got me to thinking about this stuff in your posts about the lunar photography. I realized that much of the latest fashion and style during my childhood in the 80s featured these white, silver, grey and beige tones that call the Apollo photography to mind. From Star Wars to office buildings to Apple computers, it was all over the place -- even on my toys and bikes.
I think it's on its last legs as I've noticed people complaining about the lack of color in contemporary art and architecture.
That pink outfit is a thing of glory, my heavens.
My dad was a big fan of Rosey Grier, the NFLer who also published Knitting For Men. Not confirming to sex role stereotypes was not invented in 2015🙄, nor even by David Bowie!
All the grey: abstraction is in, AI tech is the highest status job, the highest concepts are mathematical not aesthetic or religious. Strivers want to display they are operating in a realm where pretty colors are irrelevant.
Finally: are you running an experiment to see the sex ratios of comments on your MVP posts to your fashion posts?
The most vividly colored blockbuster of the last 20 years was probably the post-transition Wachowskis “Speed Racer”, which bombed. Anyway, in comparison to the washed-out “Matrix” look the brothers/sisters seemed to get a lot more into color after they started taking lots of estrogen. What means?
I'm a professional Visual Designer. I've spent 3 decades now presenting designs for review, and from my experience I've noticed that men seem to respond more to shape/composition, and women to color. When a man gives feedback to "make it pop" more, he'll suggest making the text bolder or CTA button larger. When a woman gives feedback she'll suggest making the text or CTA button a brighter color ("more noticeable"). My pet theory is that our male ancestors needed to be good at identifying the shape of a bison on the horizon, and our female ancestors had to be good at identifying subtle colors of different edible plants (so they wouldn't poison the tribe by mistake), and the brighter colors of fruits - this influenced evolution and we still retain these traits today. Anyway, that's my theory. Not sure it would apply to the Wachowskis, however (even after they became sisters)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/brain-babble/201504/when-it-comes-to-color-men-women-arent-seeing-eye-to-eye/amp
Color blindness is also much higher in men.
On the other hand, cinematographer and master painter are almost exclusively male professions.
One area of design that has definitely not grown less colorful in recent years is book design — books becoming more and more female-dominated. So that suggests the garish 1970s as perhaps the peak of female interior decorating power, when women had more purchasing power but the married family was still considered the norm. As the public culture has become more egalitarian and marriage has declined car and home colors have thus become more neutral.
The people making design decisions in the 60s & 70s had grown up with B&W photography, movies, magazines, newspapers, & then TV.
What I found especially odd is MacDonald's restaurants going from a red-orange-yellow color scheme to a muted grey-beige look. When driving a car full of hungry kids, you used to be able to spot a MacDonalds half a mile away, and now you might drive right past one assuming it's an accountant's office.
The colors on cars now have names like Harbor Grey, Rhino, Smoke, and Pewter to denote the subtle differences in gray. In recent years there's been a trend for flat grays on cars, which seem like a safety hazard--in rainy weather, they blend right in with the wet pavement.
The color and signs of business has to do with local ordinances and economic development organizations
Any McDonald's with the old color scheme would have been grandfathered in. On occasion you will see a new one in a shopping center where they have to conform to an outside color scheme but that's the exception, not the rule
This is not the case with McDonalds. It was a corporate decision. Plenty of articles about it online.
https://www.creativebloq.com/design/branding/mcdonalds-stark-new-restaurant-designs-are-leaving-customers-baffled
https://www.thetakeout.com/why-new-mcdonalds-buildings-are-less-fun-than-old-ones-1848004096/
McDonald's red and yellow connote meat and grain. Like the tortilla, the hamburger bun embodies the sun, and the yellow arches are the trail of the sun rising and setting.
Blame it on Gaines family, HGTV, and interior design influencers. Houses are designed to be sold instead of lived in. When watching such redecorating shows it becomes obvious that day to day living is not a concern. The designers talk more about entertaining than where will the iPad and iPhone be plugged in.
I agree and think it's nuts--the idea that you would do something different to your home for the benefit of potential future owners? When I bought my first condo, it had one of those skeuomorphic fireplaces. I said "that's obviously where my big TV goes. I shall rip that fake out by the roots!" My mom was horrified. "You can't do that! You need a fireplace for resale!"
Even if the next buyer didn't want a fireplace, they too would never buy a place without one because of resale.
A few years ago I bought my first house and the living room had an oversized fireplace taking up one of the corners. It made the room impossible to arrange.
I had it destroyed and hauled away, bought a three seat sofa--that now fit in the room--and I am amazed every day that no previous owner thought to do it.