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)
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.
Sounds like the last holdover of modernism before the nineties kicked in. And also expensive.
Yes! I definitely had the huge ass tower of stereo equipment. It was a Philips branded stack and the main volume knob had a little red light on it, when you used the remote to put the volume up or down, it actually rotated the knob! It blew my mind when I saw that, so I just had to have it. It had a dual cassette deck, with fast rewind and fast copy options. A very good CD player, AM/FM radio and an amp with EQ. I think there was an option for records, but I didn’t have that, this was the 80s we needed high tech! The CD player had stuff like random order, lead-in, lead-out, etc. Mine was all black with little silver metal trims. Big ass speakers that weren’t optimized for volume or bass like these days, but for excellent sound quality and clarity.
I also had the glass shelves with a whole bunch of CDs and one of those towers where you put in the CDs at a 45 degree angle.
Man those were the days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOdrpe1CUJg
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
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.