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Notes -
Millennials weren’t dominating the new car market in 2007. They were in their mid-twenties at the latest. While I didn’t find data for ‘07, over the last decade, the under-35 age group never exceeded 15%. The Flattening started when Boomers and Gen-Xers were buying the majority of new cars.
Same goes for houses. The median house-seller was born in 1960. By 2017, that had crept forward to…1962. It wasn’t the millennials who were choosing beige or grey or whatever.
You know what was wildly popular in the early 2000s? Apple products. Ones that looked like this instead of this. The 90s was blocky and garish, but we were living in the new millennium. We could put chrome and white plastic on things. Monitors and peripherals got thin and sleek. This might be the only time that software looked more skeuomorphic than the hardware on which it ran.
We’re climbing the fashion barber pole faster than ever. Modernism to postmodernism to high modernism to a colorful, psychedelic mess in only half a century. Add another fifty years of nuclear ennui, a pinch of Moore’s law, and stir. The memes of 2014 feel ancient in a way that 60s counterculture cannot, because the latter never really died so much as it was commercialized and co-opted. Well, we got used to that, and now it’s taken for granted that corporations will sell cheap merch representing your preferred minority.
So don’t blame the gays for sending your 70s-ass appliances out of fashion. Give them ten years, or maybe six months, and the barber pole will come back around.
I understand your point on cars, even if I'd argue this generation influenced colors more than buying power might suggest.
But one doesn't have to own a house to influence or consume interior design patterns. The boomer women I know, of course, follow interior design trends, but the moniker "millennial grey" emerged because it was appearing in apartments and social media from said people.
I also agree the cycles appear to be accelerating.
In the UK, the conventional wisdom was that "millenial beige" (which I think is the same colour - I have also seen the style called "greige") was a product of the high-end rental market which exploded after the 2008 crisis and the near-disappearance of 95% LTV mortgages.
If you are a landlord, it is more important to be good enough for whoever shows up on day 1 to get a tenant in quickly. And that means maximally inoffensive.
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