Modernism vs. postmodernism: the shift that changed 90s branding
The 80s sold one polished promise: buy this and you’ll be successful. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl traces how that promise collapsed as art and culture moved from modernism to postmodernism, and why it left a generation suspicious of brands. It’s a quick primer on the invisible forces that shaped 90s branding, with lessons for brands that still try to speak in one voice to everyone. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on the 90s, When Brands Stopped Giving a Shit.
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Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl starts with the 80s: a boom in corporate power, consumerism, and Wall Street influence, and brands that sincerely sold wholesome aspiration and a better life. Culture pushed back. Music went from hair metal’s polish to grunge’s outsider grime, and from polished pop and new wave to gangsta rap.
Underneath those shifts, he argues, was a bigger one: the end of high modernism and the rise of postmodernism. Modernism believed in progress, universality, rational systems, and one right answer. Postmodernism, shaped by globalization and exposure to other cultures, held that there is no single truth, that meaning depends on context, and that identity can be highlighted and even constructed. High and low culture flattened together, and remixing became the dominant aesthetic.
For brands, that meant the universal story stopped working. Gen X saw corporations selling a single path to happiness that didn’t reflect their world, and selling out became the era’s defining fear. The 90s turned complex, nuanced, cynical, and edgy because the big promise no longer applied to everyone.
Highlights
The 80s sold sincere, wholesome aspiration; the 90s reacted against it.
Modernism believed in one universal truth; postmodernism said meaning depends on context.
Globalization showed consumers there was no single monoculture.
High and low culture flattened, and remixing became the era’s signature move.
Fear of selling out made Gen X deeply distrustful of brands.
Key insights
Meaning depends on context
Postmodernism’s core idea is that a thing means what its culture and viewer bring to it. A brand can’t exist in a silo and expect everyone to read it the same way.
One story for everyone stops working
Once people could see a bigger, more varied world, a single promise of success through consumption felt false. Brands still speaking in universal terms were the ones that lost trust.
Remixing was born from the collapse of hierarchy
When luxury and low culture could sit side by side, mixing art forms, ideas, and products became the aesthetic of the age, a pattern brands still draw on.
Distrust follows when brands lag culture
Gen X’s distrust came from a gap: the world had changed and corporations hadn’t caught up. Calvin calls it a tale as old as time.
Detailed analysis
Calvin’s point is that art movements aren’t just art-school trivia; they describe the forces guiding culture as a whole. The swing from Donald Judd’s pure minimalist cubes to Basquiat’s messy, identity-filled paintings mirrors the swing from brands selling a universal ideal to audiences that wanted their own identities reflected back.
That gap between a changing world and brands still telling the old story is what made the 90s cynical. It’s also a warning for brands today: when culture moves and a brand doesn’t, the audience notices first.
Conclusion
The 90s weren’t edgy by accident. They were the cultural fallout of the move from modernism to postmodernism, when people stopped believing in one truth and started distrusting anyone who sold one.
For brands, the lesson holds: meaning is made in context, and a story that ignores its audience’s world will read as a lie.
Transcript
We had just a huge, massive growth in corporate power, in consumerism, and Wall Street influence in the ’80s. We had just blatant consumerism, and brands were really sincere about just selling a kind of wholesome aspiration and a better life. The idea that if you buy this, you will become successful. And we became really skeptical of that.
So we became skeptical, and the whole world started beginning to react to this culturally. You see this in some really fun, simple examples. In music, you had the polish of hair metal and glam rock, but that then led to the outsider drugs and dirtbaggery of the grunge movement. You had polished pop and new wave music, and that led to gangsta rap, and that took over pop music.
But my specific area of interest is throughout all of that, and throughout all of culture and art. The ’80s kind of symbolized the end of high modernism in art and culture and led to postmodernism. And I’m talking about that for anyone who’s nerdy enough about this stuff. Think Donald Judd’s minimalist pure cube sculptures to the messy, identity-filled paintings of Basquiat. That’s the kind of cultural movement we’re talking about.
So when we’re thinking about what that dramatic change from modernism to postmodernism did, let’s just talk about that a little bit, because I think these things feel really amorphous, and they’re really just movements that describe the invisible forces that are guiding our culture as a whole. It feels like something you should only learn about in art school, but these are larger cultural movements.
What those all symbolize: modernism, mid-century, kind of peaked in the ’70s and ’80s, and it really was this idea that modernism believed in the power of progress. The idea of universality, that everything can be universal. It believed in rational and logical systems and just the idea of one pure truth. The idea that there was only one good solution, one good answer.
And postmodernism was a reaction to this. As the world became more globalized, we learned about other cultures. We realized there is no one truth. We realized everything is relative. Pluralism and relativism became the norm, because we gained more knowledge about the world.
And as globalization really started taking hold, for branding and art, what is really important that we realize is that meaning really depends on context. It’s about what the culture brings to it, what the viewer brings to it. It can’t just be a thing existing in a silo by itself. That’s what a lot of minimalist artists from the modernist era were like: you have a cube, it’s in a room, it exists only as it exists. A lot of ideas like that.
So we had this realization that we are not one global monoculture, and individual identity could be highlighted instead of generalized, and identity could even be constructed. And this was a time when there was a flattening of high and low culture. You had luxury mixing with low-culture things, and the idea that those things could exist together. And that led to basically what we now think of as the start of remixing. It led to the aesthetic, ideological culture of remixing disparate art forms, ideas, perspectives, products. That’s the creation of postmodernism: this idea where all of these things could mix together, and based on context, we had different perspectives on them.
So that’s a big, heady reason as to why there was this transition to the ’90s, where all of a sudden everything became more complex, more nuanced, more cynical, more edgy, because we realized that we had been sold this universal story that didn’t apply to all of us anymore.
So there’s this realization that the world was more complex and nuanced than we ever thought, because now the world’s more connected than ever. Globalization is happening, we get bigger context for the rest of the world. And so we started realizing that corporations were kind of selling a lie, that there was this one truth that led to happiness.
And it really generated this idea that was so rife during the ’90s: the idea of selling out. If you were an alternative kid in the ’90s, early 2000s, the idea of selling out was your greatest fear. There was this fear of buying into what the corporations were selling, and we were all suspicious of selling out, and that became a major anxiety of that time, giving in to the corporations.
So that was a really unique time, and I think Gen X became really distrustful of brands, because they saw the world around them and they realized that corporations were no longer reflecting the authentic view of their world. So that was what really created the distrust in that moment. Big changes in the world. Corporations hadn’t caught up. Tale as old as time.
One second, I’ve got to adjust my mic here a little bit. Getting a little hot today. I must be excited. I’m talking a lot.