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.
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.
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.
Baggy grey clothing that looks like something the fremens from Dune would wear has been fashionable for the last few years but I'm not sure is a white people thing. This is how all that merch from Kanye looked.
It's ugly but it fits the dystopian vibe of our times.
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!
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 album 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
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 in the meantime.
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Baggy grey clothing that looks like something the fremens from Dune would wear has been fashionable for the last few years but I'm not sure is a white people thing. This is how all that merch from Kanye looked.
It's ugly but it fits the dystopian vibe of our times.
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.
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 album 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
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 in the meantime.
Every interior designer on social media is now screaming against gray; gray floors in particular. Definitely over done.
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.
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?
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?
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/