Excessive Opinions

Why does everything from the 40’s and 60’s look awesome? It just has a much cooler feel, the clothes (hats especially,) the transportation, food, the Americana of the advertising, even stuff like the older guns or the quality of the music. It all just has a much cooler feel to it. Even smoking was cooler then, currently when I think of a cigarette my mind goes almost instantly to a group of 16 year old chavs standing outside that one off-licence that doesn’t check IDs. 

Even the jobs, it all felt like you were doing something worthwhile. Nowadays it all seems futile. 

Either that or it’s just the depiction of it. I mean obviously everything I see is from the media but even in terms of that; they are definitely a couple of the more iconic decades.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, I’m well into my course at university and from that questions about future career choices start to arise. All the things I would love to do all seem to be for dead or dying industries or have suffered from structural change. The advancement of technology, specifically the internet and the age of information, has left us with a lack of mystery or intregue.

I am 100% behind projects like Wikileaks, Wikipedia; even Google or IMDb. They provide us with more information than we would ever need but it’s somehow removed the appeal of certain jobs. To be an investigatory journalist, a P.I. or even a copper; they were somewhat romanticised as career paths. Now we just have the very un-sexy image of the borderline agoraphobic blogger, a perv with a high tech camera and legally dodgy social network data mining habits and some lazy yet overworked pastry dependant divorced alcoholic who spends more time behind a desk filling out paperwork than walking a beat.

We have L.A.Noir, Philip Marlowe novels, Mad Men and recently even this new show Alcatraz has a couple scenes set in 1963. It just makes me think, there is definitely a trend within humanity not to let go of the past. Television, film, literature and now even video games; there’s many ways to try and experience what our great grandparents may have experienced for real. To live in a different time. 

Really what I’m getting at is I would like to live in a world where the fedora or the trilby (even a panama trilby) are widely accepted as commonplace. Rather than baseball caps or beanies which seem to be the only legitimately non-hipster hats in the 2000’s and 2010’s. We’re only two years into this decade, surely we can make the switch over to a more vintage look; get everyone wearing suits again and ban the wearing of sweat pants outside of a gym.