Politics
The official death toll from the September 11 terrorist attacks stands at 2752 but there was another casualty that day – the death of implausibility, as a scenario that would have been dismissed as unbelievable by the most coke-addled Hollywood producer unfolded in real time on our television screens.
Almost 10 years on, it is still a stretch to process the imagery. One passenger jet and then a second gliding into the glass and steel of the World Trade Centre, a third plane hitting the Pentagon, a fourth crashing in a Pennsylvania field, the first tower falling, the second following, the defining (and at the time, self-censored) image of The Falling Man, his identity still the matter of conjecture, who exited this hell by jumping some 100 floors to his death, frozen forever in a serene upside-down repose.
The enduring incomprehensibility of the event is best captured in our collective water-cooler take on what we had just witnessed – and how many times have you heard people say this – “We were sitting up watching TV and thought it must have been a film.”
The ghostly image of a dazed woman wearing a white burns mask over her face outside the London Underground.
Bodies and body parts strewn over the sleepers at Madrid’s Atocha railway station, as if in some twisted detail from Picasso’s Guernica.
The methodical room-by-room execution of guests at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, many of them cowering in their closets reporting their pending demise via Twitter, their killers not being part of an elite terror cell but a young, ragtag bunch of al Qaeda franchisees who simply loaded up their rucksacks with grenades and guns for a day out.
Perhaps saddest of all, on the one-year anniversary of the 2004 Beslan school siege in Russia of which 186 of the 334 dead were children, families making a monument out of water bottles in angry remembrance of the terrorists’ tactics in denying the children anything to drink as they wired up the basketball stadium with explosives.
And, of course, Bali.
This world is a world away from the one which existed 10 years ago.
Just three months after the Bali attacks, Australia joined the US and Britain in the invasion of Iraq, a war which initially looked like a walk in the park. CNN beamed the live feed of Hussein’s statue being toppled and slapped with sandals by a joyful crowd. Mission accomplished, Bush declared. But the conflict quickly collapsed into a mano-a-mano quagmire from which the US has still not extricated itself.
The end of the Bush era and the victory of Barack Obama may have helped restore America’s standing in much of the world. Despite sometimes lapsing into symbolism and sentiment, it was correct to report the election of America’s first black President as the final step in the long march to civil rights.
But the challenges facing Obama are the same as the rest of the civilised world, Australia included, for the decade ahead.
To help restore the function and credibility of capitalism after it very nearly collapsed on itself through mismanagement and greed.
And to do so in a global environment where, as we learned in Australia on the night of September 11, 2001, when we were innocently channel surfing before heading to bed, nothing is implausible any more.
- David Penberthy
Pop Culture
When Stanley Kubrick sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey hit cinemas back in 1968, we thought we’d glimpsed the future. Talking computers, a Hilton hotel on the moon and manned trips to Jupiter were all part of the Jetsons-like noughties. Or at least we thought.
What is chilling, however, is just how much Kubrick (and Arthur C Clarke who wrote the book and screenplay) got right. While we may still be some way off Jetstar trips to Jupiter, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has space covered while the internet is far more advanced than anything even the smartest sci-fi brain could have dreamed up. Add to the mix multifaceted mobile phones, iPods, sat nav and social networking sites, and you have a highly evolved technological world that, if we’re honest, none of us could have come close to prophesying back in 1999.
But it’s what these changes meant that would come to define the noughties: information. Oodles of it. More than we knew what to do with, in fact. What’s more, with the advent of Twitter, Blogger, YouTube and Wikipedia, we were even allowed to add to that overload ourselves and become that scariest of things – bedroom media moguls.
Of course, the new media technology wasn’t all about hard news. For every user following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai or the post-election unrest in Tehran, there were dozens keeping tabs on Ashton Kutcher’s musings about Demi’s underwear, or keying “Lily Allen wardrobe malfunction” into Google. We wanted to stay in touch with the real world, but a glossy, glam version of the real world, with beautiful people in beautiful clothes, leading beautiful lives. A famine or a hurricane touches our very humanity, but hey, did you see what SJP wore to the Golden Globes? Or what Paris Hilton <didn’t> while getting out of that car?
Celebrity obsession is nothing new. After all, Brad and Angelina are just a repackaged version of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But because of our new, 24-hour medium, the noughties will be remembered for its microscopic detailing of celebrity lives. Want to know how Kim Kardashian lost all that weight? Easy – just follow her on Twitter. Interested in what Lindsay Lohan had for breakfast? Pick up a copy of NW.
We went deeper into celebrities’ lives than we ever thought possible, often violating their privacy. It was entertaining, startling and then just a little too confronting. Tom Cruise’s sofa-vaulting protestations of adoration for Katie Holmes, Pete Doherty’s intravenous escapades posted online, and then in 2007, Britney Spears’ very public disintegration, played out through the lenses of the world’s paparazzi. Had we learned nothing from the story of Princess Diana, that sacrificial victim of our lust to know too much about not very much? And weirdly, even as we watched our idols being decimated by the celebrity machine – Michael Jackson’s fate being particularly depressing – many of us wanted to join them on the catwalk.
Are we weaning ourselves from the celebrity teat? Not entirely: we’ll probably always need someone out there whose wardrobe is more ostentatious than our own and whose love life is more disastrously complex. But maybe the celebrity overload of the noughties has hit some sort of critical mass. In the coming years (incidentally what will we call them? The tens? The teens? The teenies?) will we take a more critical, distanced view of the whole phenomenon? Let's hope so.
- Tim Footman
Fashion
Beginning any fashion retrospective with the words Sex and the City is like writing a history of the hamburger and leading with McDonald’s. But the influence that the show’s costume designer, Patricia Field had on the clothing we wore throughout the entire noughties – even today, five years after the series wrapped – can’t be overstated. Sure, there were the statement pieces: the gold nameplate necklace, the oversized corsages, the tiered racks of Manolo Blahnik heels. But Field’s true legacy is more enduring than any flash-in-the-pan fashion moment. SATC was almost single-handedly responsible for popularising the concept that from here on in, when it comes to fashion, anything goes. Eclecticism rules. Take one ’70s jumpsuit, an ’80s-style bomber jacket and ’90s pointy stilettos, add an off-kilter scarf or cuff, some imagination and confidence and voila. You’re dressed.
Carrie’s fashion fearlessness set the stage for the decade. Without Carrie there’d be no blueprint for the boldness of Chloë Sevigny, Agyness Deyn, and the Olsen twins. There’d be no high street/designer mishmash, no worship at the altar of vintage, no dress-a-different-decade-every-day-of-the-week. Today you can wear whatever you damn well please if you’ve got the confidence and imagination to, forgive me, Carrie it off.
Of course, the 21st century hasn’t been a total cut-and-paste job. A number of unique trends emerged: the birth of premium denim, the rise of “masstige” fashion in the form of high street/designer collaborations (Stella McCartney for Target, Camilla & Marc for Portmans and Karl Lagerfeld for H&M, just to name a few) and the frenzies of the It bag and the It shoe.
The twin It phenomena (namely shoe and bag) were unprecedented. The genesis of the must-have bag arguably began with the Fendi Baguette in the late ’90s but found its noughties niche with the oversized leather offerings of Chloé (the Paddington), Marc Jacobs (the Stam) and Fendi again (the Spy). For much of this decade, your outfit revolved around your ultra-luxe, ultra-pricey bag. Then, as the breadth and weight of our bags started making us look a little like bag ladies (we’re looking at you, Mary-Kate), the It shoe stepped up to the plate. Suddenly the way to get noticed was with freakish footwear: reference the Dior Extreme Gladiator Platforms, the Marc Jacobs inverted heel and the Chanel pistol-shaped heels (could anyone really pull off the latter except Madonna?). The best bit about these trends? You could now lift your look with the perfect heel and it didn’t matter if everything else was Target or Sportsgirl.
So what next for the way we dress? Where can we go when we’ve thrown open the floodgates and declared that the only true fashion is no fixed fashion at all? How will we feed our fashion famine as the century enters its teens, when fashion appears to have eaten itself? Who will be our new Carrie Bradshaw? We can’t help but wonder.
- Alexandra Carlton
Sport
The noughties should be remembered as one of the most memorable decades in sporting history: scandals, success and a fresh generation of stars – it had the lot.
From the moment a 27-year-old Cathy Freeman lit the ring of fire-cum-waterfall that (eventually) rose to become the Sydney Olympic cauldron back on a chilly September evening in 2000, it was clear this was going to be a sporting decade unlike any other − especially for Australians. For a couple of weeks, the world was happy and harmonious, united by five interlocking rings and a flame that burned as brightly as the passion in people’s hearts. When International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch declared Sydney’s Olympic staging “the best ever”, we couldn’t have agreed more. Fifty eight medals − 16 gold, 25 silver, 17 bronze plus a smattering of pulverised world records − at last signalled our sporting pedigree to the rest of the world.
But as the Olympic haze cleared, a new sporting horizon dawned – the celebrity sports star. Perhaps best personified by David Beckham, the falsetto-voiced football player from Essex, England, who married a pop star, put his name to everything from chocolates to underwear and made hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Sports brands like Nike and Adidas have long had a history of being affiliated with some of our brightest sports stars, but the noughties saw a whole raft of canny lifestyle brands pillaging the sports arena for a fresh, saleable face: Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf selling Louis Vuitton luggage, Maria Sharapova flogging Tiffany jewellery, Ian Thorpe and that range of pearls.
But amid the greed and the glory, the noughties will also be remembered for its dark shadows and blistering scandals. Long-held suspicions over debauched “after-hours” behaviour within Australia’s rugby league ranks were at last unearthed with the infamous Bulldogs Coffs Harbour rape allegations coupled with a string of recent lurid sex scandals which dulled the once-gleaming reputations of players like Matthew Johns. And who can forget 2007’s “toilet tryst” which found Bulldog star Sonny Bill Williams en flagrante with one-time iron woman Candice Falzon in a pub toilet cubicle?
What will the next 10 years bring? Who knows, but an exciting new stream of athletes − Hawaiian female golfer Michelle Wie, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and 17-year old Aussie swimmer Cate Campbell – look set to keep things interesting. As for the 2012 Olympics, we predict one thing: it won’t beat Sydney.
- Jessica Montague