Great clothes, no Instagram — was this last 'best decade ever'?

One of the stranger trends on the discussion platform Reddit highlights just how many variations there are on this one question: why did the Nineties look like that?

- Adam White, The Independent

Most of the time the people posing them are too young to remember 9/11, let alone the years immediately preceding it. But they share a fascination with the photographs taken of that decade, and the clothes, and the makeup. Sometimes the question is about the era's cars, or its architecture, or its films and television. What was up with how good everything looked? Why did light seem that much kinder? Why do street scenes in the original Sex and the City hold so much colour and vibrance, yet the street scenes in And Just Like That look as if you're watching Sarah Jessica Parker skip around an Apple store? Why, the children ask, do the Nineties just seem... better?