DESIGNERS Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway are bringing their vintage festival to Scotland in the summer, whirling Glasgow's Merchant City in a time travel vortex before bringing it to a dizzying halt smattered with cultural highlights from the 1920s to the 1980s.
It will all be going on: rockabilly, swing, disco, tea dresses, Victory rolls and Teddys. Hemingway believes the two-day event will draw 190,000 visitors and I believe he's right.
Not a weekend goes past without some kind of vintage fair or retro dance night or second-hand clothes shop popping up. We're enthralled to the past.
The Hemingways' event set me thinking: what are our bellwethers? What would the vintage-seeker of 2073 find in the archives while trying to throw a 2010s party for his chums? They'd have to sit about in onesies and listen to One Direction. I wish I were exaggerating.
Onesies, an infantalising all-in-one garment, oft patterned, too often with ears, are the garment of the season. Even the odd couple, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, were quizzed on them. Last month live on a London radio show Mr Clegg was asked if he is in possession of an adult romper suit (yes, a big green one, still in its wrapper) and, just four days later, Mr Cameron was tested on the same point while appearing on ITV's Daybreak (no, but he's jealous of his kids'). Onesies are all we have.
If you cast a mind's eye back over the preceding eras they are so easily and instantly definable. The 1920s, 1930s and 1940s need little to no introduction. The 1950s and 1960s come striding down cultural Main Street with a marching band playing their recognisable tunes. The 1970s, the Me Decade, according to novelist Tom Wolfe, had The Boss, Fleetwood Mac, Carole King, disco suits, wrap dresses and wedges. The 1980s had cocaine, neon, uncontrollable hair, shoulder pads and keep fit, making it probably one of the easiest dress-up decades in history. It had Camaros, excess and the beginnings of the Young British Artists. As the midnight of the 1980s ticked into the early morning of the 1990s even Cheers became Frasier. Then the 1990s had Britpop, Friends, Titanic, the Spice Girls, Nirvana, grunge rock, rap and Robert Mapplethorpe.
We now have reality talent shows. I was dispatched to review the The X Factor Live Final last week and The Jacksons this week. What an embarrassment these undercooked, fame-desperate teenagers look compared to that original boy band.
I was too young to enjoy the reality of the 1990s but what high hopes I held for my early adulthood in the 2000s, what an itch for a zeitgeist to accept or reject. Here we are, though, and ... nothing.
The problem is the name. I think this decade suffers from not having an easily pronounceable name. What is the decade called? The Twenty-Teens? It's barely distinguishable from the 2000s, the cringing Noughties.
What we have is just not very good and, sadly, we're screwed until the 2020s or someone comes up with a snappier title. Until that happens we can content ourselves with mining the past, reliving the best of what we'll never get back.
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