lifetime piling up

More about history and style:

"It's been over a year since the end of the Eighties. This gives us some distance, some perspective. The Eighties are now, officially, history.

The Eighties were a decade of comebacks: suspenders, mini-skirts, Roy Orbison, Sugar Ray Leonard... But the really big comeback was history. We got rid of history in the Sixties; saw what the world looked like without it in the Seventies; and begged it to come back in the Eighties.

And it did; it came back with a vengeance. In design, history came back as well. Suddenly, there were countless books--big, glossy, oversize volumes--and starchy little journals devoted to the history of design. Career were constructed around this fascination. Conferences, too. And there's nothing wrong with studying the history of design. In fact, it's healthy and smart, especially for design professionals. At the same time, the indiscriminate use of history has produced some really bad, unhealthy design. History in itself isn't bad, but its influence can be."
--Tibor Kalman, J. Abbott Miller and Karrie Jacobs, "Good History/Bad History"