GIN AND BEAR IT
At some point in the 2010s, gin and tonic went through a transformation. It used to be a drink you inappropriately made for your dad after work (oh, 20th-century parenting); now it’s artisanal, aromatic, flavoured and ‘craft’, served with pink peppercorns or elaborate shavings of fruit peel. Now you can order a G&T and somehow pass it off as an intellectual thing, instead of just a getting-drunk thing.
This has also been the decade of prosecco’s rise and fall – it overtook champagne as Britain’s favourite, more affordable fizz in 2013, and turned ‘It’s Tuesday night!’ into a good enough reason to celebrate. The party didn’t last, alas – they never do; sales dropped by three million bottles last year. Meanwhile, the Aperol Spritz has also dominated the 2010s (or the tensies, because every decade needs a cute nickname) as the cocktail that makes drinking on a pavement seem ‘continental’. Although Nigella slightly took the fizz out of it when she described it recently as ‘Tizer-like’.
LITERARY HIGHS
Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan novels’, starting with My Brilliant Friend, were the literary phenomenon. I haven’t read them, and therefore have not accumulated enough zeitgeist points to proceed to 2020. But the tensies also gave us Sally Rooney, the 28-year-old Irish novelist whose second book, Normal People, is coming to a BBC channel near you next year. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, meanwhile, may have been published in 1985, but it’s enjoyed a second wave of success, thanks to the TV adaptation – and this year her sequel, The Testaments, shared the Booker Prize (with Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other). If you haven’t read any of these, start now, or we’ll all have to re-sit the decade.
NUTRITIONAL LOWS
In the run-up to Christmas 2014, John Lewis sold one NutriBullet – the ‘nutrition extractor’ – every 30 seconds. Hot on its heels followed the year of the spiraliser, 2015: someone had the genius idea of making vegetables look a bit more like pasta, but we wised up to that pretty quickly. Unfortunately, no amount of spiralling will make a courgette as satisfying as spaghetti, so as a dietary trick it was about as effective as painting a couple of carrot sticks brown and calling them a Twix. The tensies have been a golden era for nutrition paranoia, with gluten, sugar, dairy and even peppers and tomatoes taking turns to be dangerous. It’s also been the decade that we’ve learned to love (or tried to) virtuous ingredients such as kale, quinoa, chia seeds and kombucha. Ultimately, many of us have reduced our meat intake, and vegan and vegetarian options are better than ever. Considering the environmental impact of cattle-rearing, that can’t be a bad thing.
INTERNET CRAZES
Though the acronym FOMO was coined in 2004, it’s the 2010s that we’ve really spent grappling with our pathological fear of missing out – with the result that we’ve thrown ourselves into craze after craze. In 2010, it was ‘planking’: being photographed lying face down in weird places. Or perhaps you partook in 2014’s ice bucket challenge? Britney Spears, Tom Hiddleston, Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey did. Then in 2016, there was the mannequin challenge, in which people froze eerily in place while the camera moved around them – Michelle Obama won that. Meanwhile, good riddance to dabbing, flossing and the Harlem Shake.
INSTA-APPROVED INTERIORS
Is there a room in your home that could be described as ‘millennial pink’? Do you have a pineapple-shaped lamp, jewellery holder or candlestick? Do you have so many velvet furnishings that eating or drinking anywhere other than the kitchen is now nail-bitingly risky? This is the aesthetic that has swept the Western world thanks to Instagram, and it’s ironically kitsch, except we can’t remember how we’re being ironic about it. If you’ve visited a restaurant or bar with blush mirrored walls and shell-shaped sinks that are just crying out for a selfie, you can put that down to the ’gram effect too.
THE HEN DO ARMS RACE
Organise a hen in 2009 and you’d have been met with raised eyebrows if you’d suggested anything more complex than eight bottles of fizz and a stripagram. Now, you’re underperforming if your plans don’t include a week’s holiday in Marbella, a masterclass in something insane – like blow-jobs or show-jumping (‘It’s a bit of fun!’) – or a challenge during which each hen has to carve an ice sculpture that represents their favourite memory of the bride. And it’s not just hen dos that have gone mental: ‘gender reveal parties’ have become a thing too. If you’re having a baby and want to stay on trend, why not pay a pink or blue-clad circus performer to leap out of a cake to Ariana Grande’s Be My Baby?
THE ATHLEISURE REVOLUTION
This was the decade that gymwear went everywhere – including into the realms of the hyper-expensive. Designer brands made ugly trainers chic, while Goop started selling posh leggings. Everything’s got more and more casual, including the fashion editors on the front row, who once wore stilettos, but this decade converted to Stan Smiths or Vejas. After sombre years of too much camel cashmere, fashion has also rediscovered fun; in a backlash to a seriously un-fun news cycle, brands like Halpern and Richard Quinn have lifted the mood with sequins and psychedelic florals. If Carrie Bradshaw were running around Manhattan now, she’d be in mad Tomo Koizumi ruffles and hot pink Off-White trainers.
TELLY FOMO
Remember in the noughties, when everyone kept banging on about the Golden Age of TV – The Sopranos this and Mad Men that? Well, the 2010s was the decade that we went too far. So much good TV is now made, on so many different platforms, that keeping up has become like juggling deadlines. Are you really able to concentrate on enjoying Unbelievable, knowing full well that you’re missing out on Succession? Is there a tiny part of you that wishes they’d stop bringing out a new season of Queer Eye every two months? That’s because we’ve peaked. It’s all downhill from here: the whole thing will inevitably collapse, until in 2029 the only options will be Dad’s Army or Friends – again.
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