There’s this meme from a while ago that observes the fact that the 80’s and early 90’s weren’t as colourful and flashy as most media make them out to be. In fact almost everything ranging from clothing to furniture to advertising was a drab shade ranging between dark brown to orange.
Every once in a while you’d get a toy or a household appliance that would be a bright neon colour and it would be considered hi tech advanced fancy stuff (until it broke the next day).
Nowadays you’d have to look hard for dark brown/orange drab stuff. They make dark brown/orange stuff but it usually is made of a veneer of fancy wood and it’ll cost you an arm and a leg. (And then it breaks the very next day)
Lasagna couch
I wore shit like this out of the house, because of how amazingly fucking cool I was
Holy shit, don’t tell me, you had a powerglove?
You always knew houses with smokers and without. Hit you walking in the door and put a sepia tint on reality - walls, popcorn ceiling, all kinds of shit. But what kids today will never know:
Plastic covered furniture. People covered their couches and easy chairs with plastic. it was wild.
Google it, people had fitted plastic covers made for all their furniture. I don’t know if anyone ever took the covers off “oh the pope is coming over let’s go all out” attitude but it was a distinct thing.
Wood paneling. Everywhere.
Brown carpet. Everywhere.Anything that had been white was stained by cigarette smoke.
You often see the super colorful 80s in pop culture. But at the time there was also another movement going on where everything was black, white, metal and glass. I remember white rugs, a black leather couch with stainless metal, glass and black metal coffee table. Walls painted black or made entirely out of glass bricks. People wearing black and white clothes with sunglasses on. A lot of it was super classy and I wouldn’t mind having that in my home again. It was one of the first times in my life I remember home decoration being aligned with fashion, and people doing interior design.
Not to mention the 2000s video game aesthetics, where everything is “gritty” and is a shade of brown & grey. The drabness never went away, they just changed media.
I was a teenager in the eighties. I remember a “jungle” trend (khaki), purple paisley, bottle green, grey with abstract prints, light pink and grey t-shirts with the sleeves cut off and lapis blue. I have NO idea where the idea of “it was all neon” comes from.
The idea comes from the fact that there’s multiple concurrent trends at any given time. But also the BTTF posters. Also consider how the monochrome movement made neon stand out even more than it did during the vibrant 60s and 70s. And yet, all of this varies greatly by region. We’re all seemingly assuming USA, so an NYC/LA experience will not match Birmingham or Dallas
Including all the leaves, apparently.
I heard rumors that the sky was of a grey hue.
I heard it from someone who’d been on a walk on a winter’s day.
That song was written in 1963 in New York.
The prevailing colors of winter probably didn’t change much in the 20-30 intervening years, though 🤷
In the 80s the sky was the color of a dead TV channel and it was overcast.
In the 00s the sky was the color of a dead TV channel and it was clear.
Today nobody knows what a dead TV channel is supposed to look like.
Today dead channels are either blue or black with a floating “no signal” because the signal is not analog anymore
i sat on this exact couch
Ngl i saw the thumbnail and thought it was like dinner rolls or some kind of bread
60’s Paisley, tie dye & macrame 70’s Brown, orange & golden yellow. Plus a little beige. 80’s Neon, black, sparkly, & hairspray. 90’s pastel colors plus burgundy and forest green.
Turns out I grew up among hand down materials from the previous decade.
Easier to ignore the nicotine stains.
And the burn holes…
and covert shit stains
Personally I feel like it was 50/50. All the interior at-home stuff was drab and gross, but a lot of the outerwear and clothing (not what your grandma would wear) was fairly vibrant.
And hangin with mr cooper had squiggly neon lines that were never explained and never referenced.
It’s literally all I remember about that show
Trapper Keeper chic
New presidential couches?!
“We’ve got the best 👌brownest couches 🛋️ you’ve ever seen 👀 I gotta say 👐,… Epstein.”
In the not-so-distant future we’ll look back and say everything the 2020s really was just grey, wasn’t it?
Grey, black and beige.
This does not track with my reality
Thank you for your multiverse theory confirming comment. 🙏
The biggest point a relative of mine made when building a house in the mid 90s, at which point people were getting colorful with home decor again, was that there was NOT going to be anything brown in it, haha.
