Zeno Thinks: Face The Past
Last week, because I’m #culturallyrelevant, I went to the National Portrait Gallery’s Culture Shift exhibition of The Face magazine between the 1980s and the 2010s.
Two things struck me. First, before the year 2000 people’s faces were more imperfect, and way more interesting. And second, culture doesn’t seem to have shifted very much at all in recent decades.
By this I don’t just mean the fashions. Ever since teddy boys dressed like Edwardian gents, youth culture has always ransacked its parents’ wardrobe. But values and attitudes.
Alongside photography, the exhibition features an excerpt from The Face’s 2002 Youth Census, and many of the views sound startlingly contemporary.
Twenty-three years before Adolescence, it found that young men felt judged and alienated, and that there was an "emerging racist attitude among teenage boys".
Young people were disengaged from politics, didn’t like either of the main parties, didn’t feel listened to, and didn’t vote.
Agèd Millennials like me will insist the 90s and early 2000s were some golden age. But at the time 46 per cent of us felt Britain had become "a worse place to live" and were more likely to be "ashamed" than "proud" of our country.
And, even before the social media revolution, young people agreed that the "fusion of information, entertainment and advertising makes it hard to know what to believe".
But it’s not just specifically youth culture that repeats.
Market researchers Datamonitor’s trends for 2005 included: adults playing computer games, reading "kidult" literature and wearing "young" clothes; genders blurring; life-stages being disrupted; craving “sensory experiences”; and being concerned about health and therefore buying “functional” food and drinks. All of which could just as well apply to 2025.
Even if we look at more serious cultural concerns, there’s a strong sense of the familiar.
Also in 2005, the Pew Research Centre in the US was writing about a Republican president whose election victory was “narrow in percentage terms but historic in raw numbers”, whose “policy agenda differs from the public’s”, in a nation where “partisan divisions are as deep as ever”, and concluded the election was won “for one reason above all others: [he was judged to] be the stronger leader at a time when Americans feel threatened”. Ring any bells?
Another research paper identified shrinking audiences for traditional media, as people moved “toward noisier hybrid formats that aggressively fuse news with opinion or entertainment, or both”. “Young people, in particular,” it added, “are bypassing mainstream sources. At the same time, public discontent with the news media has increased dramatically.”
All of which shows one thing: the world is in some ways unrecognisable from the dawn of the millennium, but in other ways exactly the same. It’s déjà vu all over again.
Four key takeaways:
1. The real speed of culture?
Culture clearly moves more slowly than some would have us believe.
In PR, we’re part of an ecosystem incentivised to (be the first to) sell new trends. Yet speed and newness can be at the expense of identifying an actual meaningful trend (hello mermaid core).
Of course there are rapid, in-the-moment cultural phenomena, but the underlying trends that drive them are more slow-moving – and understanding them is crucial to making sense of, and getting ahead of, what’s on the surface. Or what’s a trend versus what’s trending, as Matt Klein puts it.
Action: Just because a trend is one we’ve heard before, we shouldn’t dismiss it. On the contrary – that’s how you know it carries weight. The challenge is finding a new way to interpret it.
2. The event horizon of culture
Every generation wants to feel like they’ve discovered something for the first time; no one wants to have a cause they just learned about dismissed as old hat. We’re generally less connected to culture that happens before our teens, and care less about what happens after our 20s. Which means we don’t join the dots.
Moreover, when youth culture does repeat something from the past, it’s usually thinking about it in the here and now, not as nostalgia (itself a trend first spotted in about 2018). A report from Sundial Media calls this Innovative Nostalgia – for example, seven in 10 young people buy vintage clothing to create something new, rather than recreate the past.
After all, nostalgia literally means “pain for home”, and young people’s home isn’t the past; that’s your home, grandad.
Action: Don’t misinterpret nostalgia as wallowing in the past; it’s old things being put to new uses, which is the essence of creativity.
3. The paradox of progress
The “everything has changed / nothing has changed” applies to serious social trends, too. It’s particularly striking, and depressing, at Culture Shift to see the same battles were fought in the 80s as now, like striving to make black models more prominent.
The paradox is that when an issue passes our cultural event horizon it feels new and important, which gives a sense of urgency, and urgency drives change… yet change takes a long time. It’s like a social Risset rhythm that feels like it gets forever faster while not changing at all.
Lean into the urgency, and causes can be dismissed as woke fads. Lean into the long timelines and the urgency or importance can be dismissed, or we see messaging fatigue. Squaring this circle is a key challenge for the coming decade.
Action: Take the long view: Emphasise how far we’ve come, how much we have to lose if we let up, and harness this legitimacy: DE&I isn’t a fad; it’s something sceptics’ contemporaries literally fought and died for 40 years ago. Environmental destruction was such a mainstream topic in the early 70s that even Doctor Who and Led Zeppelin spoke out against it.
4. Generation Ex
Finally, our industry’s fixation on “generations” seems to overlook that there are some attitudes that seem to come with being a certain physical age.
There may (or may not) be cohort effects that bind generations together over time, but it’s also clear that there are common personal, social and political circumstances that affect, have affected and will affect 21-year-olds whatever the year is, whatever generation they’re from.
Whether you’re Gen X, a Millennial, Gen Z or Gen Alpha, in your late teens you will have less stake in the status quo and politicians won’t care about your views.
Action: We used to think more about age groups rather than generations. Maybe we still should.
