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A 'vibe shift' is coming, apparently – and I love being too middle-aged to care | Emma Brockes
New York’s trend forecasters are predicting cultural change. I’m hoping it means 9pm bedtimes will finally have their moment
There is a particular experience that comes from living in close proximity to, but total separation from, people whose tastes may presage our tastes in future. In my neighbourhood in New York, a mile or so from the city’s downtown and Brooklyn, no one is striving to be on trend. People are, for the most part, striving to be on time, in a state of ball-park togetherness, with all their children accounted for. If I have time to look in a mirror, my thought isn’t: do I look cool? It’s, do I look normal? In keeping with the rest of the neighbourhood, it is thrillingly, absolvingly lame.
These observations are a predictably late response to the conversation around A Vibe Shift Is Coming, an article – for the benefit of those even further from the epicentre than me – published in New York magazine’s the Cut 10 days ago, which has been roiling social media ever since. In it, the writer Allison P Davis reports from the bleeding edge (irredeemably middle-aged phrasing!) of the country’s trend forecasters, who predict an imminent change in cultural trends. Jeans may go low rise, the last of hipsterdom may die and the appetite for political division and posturing, with the totemic language – “cancel culture”, “virtue signalling” – that came with it, may wither. If the pandemic acts, structurally, a little like the first world war, and with a big caveat around Russia, then the 2020s may be about to usher in a new jazz age. We may, predicts the article, lose our heads and lighten up.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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