We'll Bang, Okay?

I am nothing but the sum of my regret...

Lost in the folds inside the infinite dreamscape

On the precipice of where worlds collide

Remind me of the feeling lost in the distance

It calls, it calls

A spiral song clears the way for one willful hope

My rusted heart can hear echoes, echoes

This is what 5th century Romans looked like:

I think the problem is that pop culture has this theme park version of history that treats time periods like distinct worlds with no fluidity between them. In Roman Times, people dressed like this vs Medieval Times when people dressed like that. But that is obviously not how time works. The end of the Western Roman Empire led directly into and overlapped with the Middle Ages, and the aesthetics we associate with medieval Europe were already long established.

On a related note, the "barbarians" didn't dress like you think they did either. Less of this:

More of this:

(Art by Angus McBride)

Again, the end of the Western Roman Empire was the beginning of medieval Europe, and it already looked like it.

The notable exception was the Franks, who apparently really did dress like that:

A new research group used machine learning to track color changes in common materials and items, below is their findings for all color changes over time, they used 7000+ items from the 1800s to now to determine color changes in the most common items.

Below are the colors of cars by year, notice how the majority of cars are grey, white, or black compared to twenty years ago.

These aren't data points, but they are comparisons between the 'modern' homes of the 70s and 80s compared to the modern homes of today.

Carpets have equally had the same treatment of grey added to them! The most common color of carpet is now grey or beige.

Even locations that used to scream with color for decades have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) personality-less locations.

The world is becoming colorless, why?

the problem is that we aren’t actually allowed to belong to the places we live. houses and entire towns are shells meant to be as plain as possible for the next renter, buyer, or investor. the more generic it is, the more consumers it can be sold to. And when you have a country that’s biggest population doesn’t have a distinct sense of cultural identity it will be reflected and mass produced without much complaint