I saw the movie hype! yesterday on CityTV,

hype! is a 1996 documentary of the grunge years of Seattle. And it's a good one at that. It's affectionate but not sentimental. Included are many interviews with Seattle musicians and scenesters and even one with the originator of the Great Grunge Hoax.

As I was watching I couldn't get over one particular thought:

it looked so dated.

No kids were wearing anything shiny.
There were no cell phones.
There were no baggy pants.

I read a handful of newspaper articles about the Levi Strauss Company last week. Each told the same story : sales of Levis jeans are floundering because Levis did not change with the youth market. As well, all the articles make the same claim that today's youth have fundamentally changed since the depressing grunge years of the early nineties. Kids today are more optimistic, more capitalistic, more fashion conscious, and have more money to spend. I swear, one marketer called baggy pants 'a paradigm shift'.

What I'm not sure about, is whether there has been a genuine change in kids' attitudes or whether the claim is mere postulation made from observing fashion alone. Who can trust fashion? When Vogue put grunge on the catwalk, they appropriated the look, not the lifestyle.

So have things changed *that* much from the early nineties?

I'm not so sure, but my MS Access Magic Eight Ball says, "Signs point to yes".