What's your favorite decade from the 20s to the 00s...

[brush]

in fashion, popular music, movies and zeitgeist?

I've been watching a lot of TCM classic movies and the '40s with its film noir, innovative jazz, pop and tailored clothing styles has grown on me. The '60s are second with its music and zeitgeist.

What's yours?

[wasupaloopa]

1. In the sixties we had chukka boots with metal taps so we could

click walking the halls in school.

We had purple pegged pants with buckles in the back. We had dress shirts with fruit loops.

We had beach comber pants and boat neck shirts.

We had greasy slicked back hair and flat tops with crew wax.

We had poor boy sweaters and mod clothes

We had hippie dress and tie dyed shirts.

Plus we had jass, rock and roll and Motown.

We had Woodstock and a man on the moon.

Cars with giant fins that seem to be a mile long.


We had go go girls and folk singers with folk songs.

We had protest songs and underground news papers.

We had Haight and Ashbury and the Greatful Dead and the summer of love.

Selma, lunch counter sit ins, bus boycott and something else I did freedom rides.

We had the peace sign and smoked grass and said far out.

We had the woman’s movement and NOW.

We had the civil rights movement with the NAACP,
SNCC, Black Panthers, SDS.

We had riots and sit ins, student protests and students shot on campus. (1970)

And of course my favorite that I took part in, the Vietnam war.

And my first car a 1965 Mustang GT in 1965.

We had three assasinations John, Martin and Bobby

And more.
Please please take me back!

[smirkymonkey]

2. I think in films and music the 30's and the 40's.

I love that era! The films, the music, the clothes, the art-deco sets, the screwball comedies, the film noir, big band, jazz - I love it all!

[nocoincidences]

14. Me too!

I love 30's musicals and art deco and the music of the 40's and the film noir into the 50's.

It was the best time for movies!

[Stinky The Clown]

18. Ha! Me three!

Add Sparkly to that. We both love that era for the style and the movies. In reality, life was tough in those days.

[monmouth4]

35. Me four. I was born in 1940 and thought this world was absolutely glorious. The radio was awesome

to me as a child and the music was wonderful.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. For me, it has to be the 60's. I was young, full of optimism, and nuts

about the British Invasion.

[Generic Brad]

4. The 1980's

I was poor. I was young. I spent 6-1/2 years of that decade in universities. I met and fell in love with my wife. MTV was awesome. Musicians could still play their instruments. The beer flowed freely. I could eat whatever I wanted and not gain an ounce. Everything was new and exciting.

I suppose that's how most in their twenties feel about that time of their lives.

[spooky3]

29. I loved the fun and creative music of the 1980s.

Loved the videos.

[stonecutter357]

5. It's only 60 more years until the 80's again !

[Timewas]

6. 50'S for sure n/t

[Shell_Seas]

7. 90s. All my favorite music is from then.

I may be bias though, I was in high school in the 90s and it seems like most are reminiscent of their teen years.

[OhZone]

16. Me too -

although I do like music from when I was a little kid in the 80's too.

[Kahuna7]

8. For movie styles, the early, mid 30 is my favorite. TCM is my default TV station.

I love silent films, but a lot of the styles in the early 20s were just hideous. Very boxy and gaudy, with frizzy hair. By the late 20s the styles evolved and improved a lot.

[Raine]

9. I think it would be the 40's

I wasn't born yet but it seems like it was a more civil period, nice music, people dressed so classy, were polite. It was an earlier era but there were enough conveniences that everyday life wasn't so difficult, telephones, cars, radio, movie theaters etc.

[imanamerican63]

10. Given that I was born in American in the year of 1963......

I would say from then until the 2010's! The last two years of Trump makes this decade a awful ending to 2020's decade!

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. Music? the 70's for popular music, and marvelous zeitgeist.

Jazz and the blues of all ages is what I listen to mostly these days, tho.

Fashion. and zeitgeist......the periods of both Art Nouveau, between about 1890 and 1910 throughout Europe and the United States.
characterized by its use of a long, sinuous, organic line and was employed most often in architecture, interior design, jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration.

and Art deco. Really drool over the dropped waist dresses of the late 20's/early 30's.

Movies.....all periods had marvelous films, unique to their time and technology. But films of 30's and 40's are esp. interesting because I can see the world that my mother lived in.

[brush]

12. Nice post. Art Deco and film noir are favorites of mine too.

[karynnj]

13. 1960s.

In spite of all the tragedies, strife etc, the music beats all other decades.

[brush]

19. Yes, the '60s misic is the best hands down imo.

[no_hypocrisy]

15. Decades before my birth, I say The Twenties.

Women became emancipated esp. with the right to vote, choose whom they would marry, partied without chaperones. The jazz of Fletch Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong et al. The invention of radio broadcasting. The optimism before The Crash.

[Polybius]

17. 80's by far

90's was pretty cool too.

[ellie]

20. 1985-1995

But I am not sure if that qualifies.

[trev]

21. The 60s.

Hippies. Woodstock. Flower Power. War protests. Civil rights. The precursor to Roe vs Wade. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Easy Rider. The drug scene. Timothy Leary. Sexual liberation. The Women's movement. The environmental movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kennedy. Mad Magazine. The Pill. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. The Moody Blues. Miniskirts.

[Greybnk48]

22. For me, the 60's for the music, clothes, art, and fun!

I a sophomore in high school when the Beatles hit here along with the entire British invasion and it was a blast! Great movies and T.V. too.

It was not all good, but very significant. The Civil rights movement; the war in Viet Nam, the Moon landing, environmental awareness, women's rights rising. It was an important time to be alive, albeit sometimes very frightening for many, including me.

[Spider Jerusalem]

23. Probably the '00's in terms of social progress

most of the earlier decades, especially '60's and earlier, kind of sucked if you weren't a straight white man. There's too much good popular music from every decade to say one is better than another and you can't really compare anyway; is Little Richard better than Jimi Hendrix? Are the Stones better than Bowie? I like them all, as well as Sinatra and Louis Prima and Charlie Parker and Peggy Lee; I don't really think there's much of a "best" there. And zeitgeist? Probably the '90's. Because that was the last time we thought about the capital F Future, in terms of increasing technological advancement and things getting better for everyone; since then we've had to come to terms with the grim realities of climate change, mass extinction, and the fact that the future, whatever it is, is likely to be worse for more people than it will be better.

[betsuni]

24. I can't get enough of Paris in the '20s and '30s.

Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast"; Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer."; Anais Nin's 1931-34 diary; A.J. Leibling's "Between Meals, An Appetite for Paris." Right now I'm reading John Glassco's "Memoirs of Montparnasse," "Anais Nin's Lost World, Paris in Words and Pictures 1924-1939" and "Walks in Gertrude Stein's Paris." Brassai's photographs. The Ballet Russes. Kiki de Montparnasse. Josephine Baker singing "J'ai Deux Amours." M.F.K. Fisher. The Shakespeare and Company bookstore. The cafes. All the artists and writers, what an international city it was.

Movies in the '30s. I saw "The Awful Truth" the other day and the witty fast-paced great dialog always amazes me. Women wore slinky satin gowns and firs. Art Deco. And there's nothing like an old musical to cheer one up. Any movie set in forties New York, and Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a great forties story. All the great Abstract Expressionists in New York.

I always thought the sixties was my least favorite decade because the fashion and music I think was terrible, but I recently read Andy Warhol's "Popism" and gained a little more appreciation for the decade. How uptown and downtown started to socialize and nobody really cared about money, it wasn't embarrassing not to have any, the idea that anybody could do anything so start a band, make a movie, start a magazine. And just like the twenties, women's fashions changed drastically, but in the sixties men started to think about fashion too.

Late seventies, early eighties New York had a fantastic coming together of music, art, fashion and dance. Especially the street dancing, rap and graffiti art.

[edbermac]

25. Sixties!

British Invasion, Moon Landing for a start.

[benld74]

26. Late 60's early 70's

‘66 thru ‘76
Years 10 thru 20 for me

[912gdm]

27. 90's

thats when I was in high school.. we had the goofy fashion, music, and end of sitcoms b4 reality TV trash.

ETA: we had a weird tech crossover. When I was in grade school we were putting the 4 inch floppies in drives to play Oregon Trail, and by middle school we had the little mini Nintendo thing. In high School beepers were the thing and we all had one... Then the flip phones

[crazycatlady]

37. this

And from your post, you're probably around the same age as me.

[Quixote1818]

28. 70s nt

[blueinredohio]

34. Me too 70s

The best music whose bands are still around,still playing and still being listened to even by young kids.

[MountCleaners]

39. The Super Seventies

It was a laid-back decade - Vietnam ending, women's lib, gay liberation, black power....and the great music - classic rock, funk and soul. Watching the Nixon administration crumble a la Watergate. Bible belters were not so prominent. It was a very liberal, optimistic decade. I had a lot of fun back then - but then again, I was a kid.

[Progressive Jones]

30. The 1960s. My childhood. Born in '59.

It was an optimistic decade, despite all the dark sides.

[TeamPooka]

31. the mid century modern design and style of the 1960s

[akraven]

32. 1960's!

[Doreen]

33. My heart never left the 80"s.

All kinds of cool music, weird cloths, weird hair styles, and weird but cool movies.. I was learning dressage and also got my own horse in the 80"s. That was my favorite decade but unfortunately it was not my happiest. My happiest was in the late 70's when I lived in Berlin Germany for two years.

[NurseJackie]

36. Personally: 60's. Historically: 40's.

[llmart]

38. Without a doubt it was the 60's.

It was a revolutionary decade.

[athena]

40. If you're any kind of minority,

then you cannot pick any of the decades proposed.

If I had been born even two decades earlier, I would probably have ended up killing myself because of the oppression I would have been subjected to. No amount of great music or film or “zeitgeist” would have changed that.

Things are far from perfect now, but they’ve never been better for so many people.

[MineralMan]

41. The 60s, for personal reasons.

The entire 1960s. I was in high school until 63, and then had many adventures in my life for the remaining part of the decade.

[Jimbo S]

42. Born in 1966, I'd say the 60's

American society was coming of age. So many good things happening so quickly. Wished I was old enough then to experience it. The only drawback being the war and the draft.