This is contrary to my experience: trends and fashion were short lived, trends lasting maybe half a year, and the fashion of the last season was definitely "out". Nowadays, there's a previously unknown stability and trends shift just minimally. Which enables this "everything looks the same" phenomenon as there is minimal variation over time and lots of room for aesthetics to spread and eventually engulf and embrace everything, there is.
(I've been observing this for at least the past 15 years or so. This feels more like the "post-history" of fashion.)
Edit: Regarding the speed of communications, mind that there were much read, trend-setting magazines, which came out periodically, every week or every month and that they had to make a point, relative to the previous issues. And, as a reader, you wouldn't have referred to a past issue from half a year ago. Moreover, past issues were hard to come upon, as they weren't sold anymore. Now compare this to websites, which keep lingering around (you wouldn't discard last month's posts) and platforms, where trends gradually gain momentum, until they eventually become ubiquitous. (At this point, a trend would have been "out" and "uncool", previously, but now this is when they are really enforced by algorithms.) I'd rather argue, for things like fashion, the speed of communications has decreased considerably and stability has increased, thanks to technology.
The idea was the world went through a drastic change with WWII and the Victorian mansion started seeming like a ghostly remnant of the earlier age.
Antiques Roadshow had a similar podcast where they discussed the "brown is down" phenomenon.
Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect something about normal trends, or was it a sort of equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?
I wonder if you were to travel pre-world-war era if you'd come to the same conclusion about the speed at which fashions change. Maybe but maybe not.
Coincidentally I was talking to my spouse last night about how if you look through architecture and design websites and magazines, the stuff you see is different from what we were referring to "real estate style" and here was referred to as "Airbnb" style. In architecture and design circles there's less uniformity and more color and contrast.
The problem with this I've found is that it's difficult to find something different, of the sort in architectural circles. So if you want some of this stuff you often have to have it custom made, or made by a single boutique manufacturer, which is expensive and difficult.
So some of this uniformity in style I think is international economies of scale, which creates supply constraints and a sort of monopsony of sorts. This might be reinforcing in turn.
Something that was always fascinating to me: there had been a time, around 1100, when the style of ceilings in sacral architecture was "discussed" with urgency and churches went through 3 redesigns and rebuilds in just 10 years (from a flat ceiling, to barrel vault, to cross ribs, which became predominant in about 1105/1107 – there are several examples). This is totally unthinkable nowadays, where buildings that went through planning and construction phases of a decade and more are still considered "dernier ci".
> Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect something about normal trends, or was it a sort of equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?
I'm living in a city where most of the buildings are 100+ years old. (The house I'm living in was built in 1904.) You can usually date a building from that era by about +/- 2 years of accuracy, just by the looks, regardless, whether it's art nouveau or a more conservative expression of style. However, as you approach WWII, things considerably slowed down. (Mostly for economic reasons.)
I think, this idea of a mostly stable era is a product of the shift in paradigms, you mentioned before, where we put anything that happened before in a paradigmatic box. (E.g., like it has just recently happened with brutalism, where a wide variety and evolution of concepts and oppositions was subsumed into the same thing.)
Yes, good point. I was thinking as I was writing that it isn't exactly the world wars, something like the leadup into it and through the interwar period. I was more thinking of the post-industrial revolution in general, which was associated with tremendous societal change in general, not just militarily speaking. But you're right that the idea of a uniform "Victorian" period is a little weird and/or misleading.
(I've been observing this for at least the past 15 years or so. This feels more like the "post-history" of fashion.)
Edit: Regarding the speed of communications, mind that there were much read, trend-setting magazines, which came out periodically, every week or every month and that they had to make a point, relative to the previous issues. And, as a reader, you wouldn't have referred to a past issue from half a year ago. Moreover, past issues were hard to come upon, as they weren't sold anymore. Now compare this to websites, which keep lingering around (you wouldn't discard last month's posts) and platforms, where trends gradually gain momentum, until they eventually become ubiquitous. (At this point, a trend would have been "out" and "uncool", previously, but now this is when they are really enforced by algorithms.) I'd rather argue, for things like fashion, the speed of communications has decreased considerably and stability has increased, thanks to technology.