Earlier this week, Wirecutter shared this meme:
I’ve been saying it since at least 2018.
Scandinavian Teens Circa 1965:
But look at them. They look so much older than that. I figure they’ve got these things going for them to make them look older:
* They’re dressed like adults, unlike twenty year olds from today.
* They’re dressed like our grandparents looked (or your great grandparents if you’re under 20) in old photographs.
* They’re Europeans, who tend to look older than Americans anyway.
* Also, they’re not twenty year olds from today, who tend to look younger than their counterparts ha’centuries ago. This is not just dress (See the first bullet point above), but also in skin and general health. Better nutrition, I guess.
They Don’t Look So Young, But… (2021):
Those girls are, what, two years older than my oldest? But they look so much older. Partially probably because it’s black and white and partially because they’re wearing the clothing that my mother wore in some of her pictures, and my mother was old to me when I was young and my mother was younger than I am.
But, wait, look closely at the faces.
Ah, yes, now I can see teenagers in those old people clothes.
A Family Photo From The Paper’s Archives, Or Something Else? (2022):
It’s not actually a family photo; it is a picture of winners of the electrical co-operative’s essay winners.
Which probably means that they’re in high school.
The photo is undated, but I’m guessing early 1960s.
But none of my posts summed it up as succinctly as the meme. Although it looks as though it might have had an additional filter applied with the updated hair style.
Now, about the updated hair style: That’s pretty undated, ainna? Unless you’re a hair dresser or are really, really attuned to hair (i.e., you’re a certain type of woman), that hair style could just about be from anywhere past the late 1970s, ainna? I mean, not the tip of the spearmint of fashion, but you could imagine a woman wearing it anywhere in the last fifty years, ainna? It’s not the big hair of the 1980s, but not every girl wore that. Styles have kind of blurred and come around again in a way that they really didn’t from the 1960s. Heck, even the male mushroom head short on the sides and mop on top from the late 1990s came around a couple years ago–my son wore his hair that way for a while before deciding on a proper curl ‘fro which could have also come from the era.
What’s my point? I guess the meme reflects what I’ve said before. I dunno. I just have to waste a lot of words on it because I pay myself by the word and because longer posts cost money-losing AI companies more to train their LLMs on my copyrighted material. And if I’m not getting paid for it, I’m going to make them pay for it.
