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Segue from environmentalism to everyday life in a severely bear-market style?  Some of the news out of Euclid, Ohio, and other neighborhoods with looming foreclosures indicates that many outside tony NYC streets are also being forced into minimalist lifestyles, not because of "environmentalist choice" but out of bare economic necessity.
--Tiane

Yeah, we wrote about the emergence survival TV and a sudden collective urge to drop-out under the headline “Be Careful What You Ask” at the start of the bear market in 2000. Here’s what was going on and what The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast had to say about it in July of that year:
If you know where to look, you will find that countless seemingly disconnected fashion and social trends reflect the same underlying impulse. That was certainly true throughout the mania. In recent months, one of the most powerful changes in psychology has been a turn away from the image of prosperity. This impulse is showing up in many places. As Bob notes in Prechter’s Perspective, 1967-1970 marked years in which bell bottom jeans, long unkempt hair, sloppy shirts and boots became the style for baby boomers, and the VW became the car of fashionable choice.
The wearers insisted they merely wanted to be comfortable, not fashionable. Not coincidentally, that dramatic shift from the neat look took place as the stock market was making its final run into 1968. That was late in the topping process for Cycle III. The fashions of 1967-70 preceded the first recession in a decade. The mood behind fashion is father to the outcome. Fashion signaled a mood change, which had tangible results.

Here at roughly the same juncture in Cycle V, the very same people are “dressing down,” as companies have gone casual to “mirror and match clients.” “This uniquely ’90s phenomenon [has] penetrated most corners of corporate America.” The final holdouts, “white-shoe” Wall Street firms, gave in to pressure in April and May as junior staffers threatened to quit if they were not granted the right to come to work in casual attire. This change is socionomically of at least Supercycle importance, and it portends a long setback in social mood.

In a similar leading-edge fashion note, the House of Dior has come out with a spring-summer haute couture collection described as “homeless chic” by The New York Times. “Dior models who starve themselves posed as the starving. They came down the runway raggedy and baggy, some swathed in newspapers, with torn linings and inside-out labels, accessorized with empty litter green J&B whiskey bottles, tin cups dangling from the derriere.” The designer’s inspirations were the “hobos” he sees as he jogs along the Siene, the mentally ill and “the Rag Balls of the 1930s, when French socialites wore tattered duds.” A more intense replay of the 1930s, financially speaking at least, lies dead ahead.

Reflecting exactly the same socio-psychological trend, tastes in autos are also ratcheting down. “With Today’s Cars, It’s Hip To Be Small,” says USA Today. The reversal actually started in May 1998, one month after the peak in the advance/decline line, with the advent of the new VW Beetle, an updated version of the same car that Prechter’s Perspective identified as the turning point for car fashion in 1968. Now, Chrysler’s “PT Cruiser is causing a mania that easily rivals what the New Beetle stirred up two years ago.” This “mania” is actually a crashing reversal of the old mania. Meanwhile, discounting has become rampant in the market for supersized “sport utility vehicles,” and a rising chorus of protest against SUVs is gathering steam. The chairman of Ford, William Clay Ford, even joined the ranks by bashing his own company’s line of super-sized autos at the firm’s recent shareholders meeting. The performance “baffled shareholders, stunned Wall Street, angered dealers and left observers wondering if the latest Mr. Ford is not a proud tycoon like those who preceded him.”

This summer, A-list movie stars Nicholas Cage, Kevin Spacey, Bruce Willis and Chris Rock will undergo a role reversal that also seems to pluck long-dormant chords in the recesses of the collective mind. All four $20 million-per-movie players will be transformed in movies “extolling the virtues of poverty.” The theme in each of their latest films: “Money not only can’t buy happiness, it impedes it. ‘Having it all,’ in other words, only proves you don’t. …Money is depicted as a sinister, toxic force.” Or how about Who Wants to Be A Millionaire’s June ratings loss to Survivor, a “gladiatorial concept” show in which 16 people scramble for food and shelter. What’s the attraction? “It’s the Machiavellian twist” on the concept of becoming a millionaire overnight. Over the course of weeks, contestants vote one another off the island until there is a single million-dollar winner and 15 rejects. “It’s the suffering, the mean-spiritedness, the humiliation. …Despite Survivor’s gross-outs, its dark premise and its wall-to-wall cheesiness, viewers have embraced the desert-island soap with fascination and bemused contempt.”

Here’s another headline that also hints at a 180-degree turn:
Give Me a Break!
With the economy booming, more Americans are demanding the ultimate perk: a long breather from work.

The article quotes one burned-out, high-tech executive explaining, “I had gone over the top.” The founder of iVillage said she could not care less about the nosedive her company had taken in recent weeks. “Everyone talks about the bubble bursting. I say, ‘Who cares, when am I going to get some sleep?’” These managers should be careful. The last time people threw the culture into reverse with fashion and lifestyle statements as evocative as these, they got a much longer winter’s nap than they bargained for. Workers, to be sure, are on the verge of more free (literally) time than they ever imagined possible.
The article quotes one burned-out, high-tech executive explaining, “I had gone over the top.” The founder of iVillage said she could not care less about the nosedive her company had taken in recent weeks. “Everyone talks about the bubble bursting. I say, ‘Who cares, when am I going to get some sleep?’” These managers should be careful. The last time people threw the culture into reverse with fashion and lifestyle statements as evocative as these, they got a much longer winter’s nap than they bargained for. Workers, to be sure, are on the verge of more free (literally) time than they ever imagined possible.
A few months later when economic contraction was about to set in EWFF added:
The layoffs, particularly within the Internet economy, have now begun. Here’s another emerging vision from the “chic, palm-lined streets of the Riviera:”
Death to Money

In a sense, the guiding hand of a social mood means that people, on the whole, get whatever it is they desire. In a bear market that’s, by definition, a negative experience. The reference to the Whole Earth Catalog, which first appeared in 1968, is a vital one as The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast has noted that the social phenomena surrounding the current peak are just a larger version of the Cycle degree peak that took place in the late 1960s (for a full discussion of the analogy from EWFF see the Additional References to our June 27 post).