How the internet killed off cool . . .
NOW WE ARE 40: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GENERATION X by Tiffanie Darke (HarperCollins £16.99)
EVERY generation believes that theirs is the one that will never grow old. By some alchemical combination of optimism and technology, they will always remain as beautiful, energetic, creative and cool as they were in their prime.
To this flattering delusion, the forty and fiftysomethings of Generation X are no exception. (In case you are hazy about the precise lines of demarcation between Generations X, Y and Z, not to mention Millennials, Gen X are the ones born between the Sixties and the early Eighties — the children of the Baby Boomers.)
The journalist Tiffanie Darke has an intimate knowledge of Generation X. She belongs to it herself and, as a former editor of the Sunday Times Style magazine, she has observed its tricks and manners for more than a decade.
The shooting stars of that glittering generation — the Spice Girls, the Gallagher brothers, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Kate Moss (pictured), Sadie Frost and the Primrose Hill set — are slowing down a little now: becoming parents, moving to the country, their gatherings more likely to be dinner parties or family-friendly festivals than all-night raves or drug-fuelled club nights.
There have been casualties along the way: the brilliant talents of Alexander McQueen and Amy Winehouse cut short before their time. But in her high-spirited, affectionate and occasionally rueful account of the ‘middle youth’ of Generation X, she finds more to celebrate than lament.
According to Darke, the defining preoccupation of Gen X-ers is the pursuit of cool: ‘The Nineties were an adventure in cool . . . Britpop . . . Paul Smith . . . John Galliano . . . Soho House . . . pickled sharks . . . the Wonderbra . . . I could go on.’ By contrast, ‘no such roll call of cool exists for the Noughties or, indeed, the decade we are currently in, because instant access and transparency now conspire to make culture a pretty homogenous mass’.
The authenticity of Nineties youth culture, she argues, sprang from reallife, rather than virtual, experience. ‘In the Nineties, we physically went places to meet up, swap hairstyles and be cool . . . We didn’t connect on chatrooms or on WhatsApp groups . . . As a result our communities, whether that be our friendship group or our cultural tribe, were awesomely strong and meaningful to us . . . We were . . . the future.’
As the former prime minister, and Gen X-er, David Cameron once remarked of Boomer Tony Blair: ‘He was the future once.’ But Darke seems curiously disinclined to accept it is time for her Peter Pan generation, like every generation, to move over and make room for the young.
‘How do we make sure our experience and the lessons we have learned meld productively with the passion, energy and excitement of the new youth?’ she wonders, apparently unaware that melding with their elders is the last thing on any younger generation’s mind.
Darke’s version of events is unashamedly subjective and viewed through an exclusively metropolitan filter of celebrity and success.
Not every Gen X-er will recognise themselves in her glamorous depiction, but future historians will find a glorious fund of detail in this portrait of a generation whose moment in the sun is beginning to fade.