enders again

Three more of these "Defining the Noughties" entries from Intelligent Life. I excerpted them here because to link them from the site would have meant subjecting you fine folks to Tina Brown's crazyface submission (it involved Bernie Madoff [his smile, even]...I, in turn, submit memory loss [or shortness/shallowness of history] as among the definitive features of this near-passed decade)—

ANDY BECKETT, Journalist and author of “When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies”
Hoodies
Most teen styles in this decade looked back to earlier trends: skinny trousers were originally a 1960s working-class style that cropped up again in the 1970s new wave; emos were really just a re-working of the 1980s goth. But the hoodie belonged to the Noughties. I don’t believe it was just about the ASBO generation hiding their faces from CCTV, either. It’s more practical than that. If you spend all your time hanging around on the street in a coldish, wettish country, a hood will keep you warm, and stops the rain spoiling your hairstyle. Plus it creates a safe anonymity for a teenage boy to hide in: if you’re a skinny, pimply 14-year-old who has to deal with a lot of confrontation, putting your hood up means that, from behind at least, someone might take you for something more dangerous than you really are. Interestingly, it’s one of the few examples of working-class style that crossed all class boundaries: though I don’t think you’d catch him in huge, hip-hop sweatpants, even Prince Harry has been seen in a hoodie.

JULIA PEYTON-JONES, Director of the Serpentine Gallery, London
Apple. Instant landmarks. Price tags
On any future film set seeking to represent the decade, technology, and in particular Apple, would have to be central. Architecture too. It’s not that no one was aware of architecture or design technology before, but it was in this decade that these things became embedded in our lives. Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Sir Norman Foster: landmarks for eternity appeared worldwide. Think of Dubai and what it represents: the idea that things can appear out of nowhere as if ready-made: it didn’t exist a moment ago and now here it is, fully formed. And what underpins this is the thing that underpins everything else: the pound or dollar sign. This was the decade when it became completely acceptable that there was a price tag for everything.

TOM HUNTER, Photographer
Mega pixels
Pixellated images are a very important part of the look of this decade. With the twin towers, Abu Graib and so on, most of the images we saw were very pixellated: a lot of them were shot at distance on video cameras or cellphones. These were not theHasselblad images we got back from the surface of the Moon in the 1960s. Plus everyone has a phone on them now and everyone is recording stuff all the time, so the low-res, heavily pixellated image is very much the means by which we see things. Imagery is no longer the preserve of professional image-makers.