This week, a single page from GQ’s September 1995 print issue made the rounds, first on Reddit, then X, and finally, the tabloids. It was the 1995 Overrated List, comprising 81 people, places, and things the staff deemed “utterly unworthy of the praise and respect they’d received.”
Many of the 28-year-old entries are highly era-specific (designer Buddhism; Fiestaware; Hootie & the Blowfish); others are mind-numbingly daft (if you’ve ever flipped through a men’s magazine from before, say, 2017, you know what we mean—one cringeworthy example is “Any British woman described as a beauty”). But a good handful of the items on the list (righteousness about Ticketmaster; upscale taquerias; hosting of the Olympic Games; telling it like it is) are still goofily resonant on this side of the millennium. “There’s still a lot of mediocrity and outright crap out there that’s getting a free ride. But not here,” the team at GQ wrote then. Ain’t that the freaking truth.
Because we are still, three decades later, trading in the marketplace of ideas, we now present an off-the-cuff collection of trends, concepts, and minutiae the GQ editorial team is griping over in 2024. May it age as badly as the list by our 1990s predecessors.
In no particular order:
Dating-app doomerism
Popping Zyns
Yearning
“The most important election of our lifetimes”
Kratom
Red meat
Flying to Europe for a concert
Pop-ups
Natural wine
Not wearing a tie
Dupes
Telling it like it is
Playing devil’s advocate
Grinding
Complaining about burnout
Gorp footwear
Extending your lifespan
Smash burgers
Magazine stories about ethical nonmonogamy
Watching everything with subtitles
Funky ceramics
Doing hard drugs at weddings
Being bicoastal
Tiny tattoos
Reexamining the past
Self-diagnosing
Subway tile backsplashes
Up-and-coming mid-size cities
Pop Stoicism
Getting mad about Dimes Square
Reality TV
Prestige TV
Dressing in –cores
Documentaries
Working from home
Anti-nepotism
Nepotism
Fashion mullets
Restaurant reservations
Vaping
Multistep skin-care routines
TikTok
Grandstanding against TikTok
Hard-launching your relationship online
Threesomes
Cannes standing ovations
Veneers
Cold plunges
Raw milk
The AI apocalypse
Finding the perfect white T-shirt
Vaccine skepticism
Decluttering
Modern farmhouse style
Ultra-slim wallets
Opening-weekend box office numbers
EGOTs
Extra-dirty martinis
Espresso martinis
Running a half marathon
Corner threes
Trying the cool new-school (or bad old-school) restaurant
Binge-watching
Aughts nostalgia
Gut renovations
Light bites
High-crown trucker hats
Poppers
Boxers
Briefs
Boxer briefs
Limited-edition vinyl
Blaming the algorithm
Roasts
The body keeping the score
“Stuns in new photo”
1995
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