Reply #3: Well....

[CanuckAmok]

As someone born in the mid/late 1960s, I found the 90s to be the most derivitive decade I've lived in.

It's almost as if the Powers-That-Be who dictate fashion and media had completely exhausted the recycling of previous decades by 1990. When you think about it, te 1990s were the end of the buying power of the first real "television generation". People who were born ten years prior to the widespread distribution of TV (1952) were pushing 60, and not really the kind of people who can be as aggressively marketed to as are teens, 20 and thirty-somethings.

In the 1990s, advertisers were marketing to a generation who had never had their own "style" which hadn't been influenced to some degree by television and radio. And, at the same time, the same Powers-Tat-Be were tapping into their own desire for nostalgia to their younger years, and the result was the 60s/70s recycling that came to define the 90s. As there was really nothing else to recycle, nothing ever was. It's almost as if we're in a kind of cultural stasis or purgatory until someone invents the "next big thing". As the people who dictate style and culture have never had anything original from which to base their talent, we may be in for a long wait.