An advert from the 90s rather naively predicted the future, and let’s just say… it was way off.
In 1996, American shirt designer Kenneth Cole launched a commercial with the assumption being it felt it would be on the forefront of the fashion world, and well, it’s got us talking, so it was right about one thing at least.
Kenneth D. Cole is a designer, social activist, and business owner who launched his company ‘Kenneth Cole Productions’ in 1982.
The advert, printed out on a single sheet of A4 paper, was as simple as it came – four predictions in black writing over a blue swirly ‘futuristic’ background with the words ’the year is 2020’.
Reacting to the Reddit post, one user said: “Damn! He was so so wrong…”
With someone else replying: “About every last bit of it.”
While another joked: “Aged like milk. Wait, it’s Kenneth Cole – aged like crème friesche.”
Fashion designer Kenneth Cole created Kenneth Cole Productions in 1982. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)
In full, the ad read: “Wars are fought by e-mail. Handguns are only in museums. All sex is safe. America is back on its feet. The year is 2020.”
Aids and HIV was still prevalent 28 years ago, and the epidemic had killed millions of people. However, while it is still around today, in 2007 a man called Timothy Ray Brown became the first person to be cured of HIV.
Of course, there are still many, many STIs about, but none that can kill you – other than HIV and syphilis if left untreated.
In 2020, the real worry was coronavirus – and that certainly could kill you.
Then there’s the guns – in America they are as accessible as ever, and in 2021 there were almost 49,000 gun deaths in the US. So you got that one wrong Kenneth – maybe in 2050?
How close do you think the fashion house came to predicting the future? (Kenneth Cole Productions)
As for wars being fought by email, one user commented: “If we change ’email’ to ‘Twitter‘, that would be accurate.”
While another replied: “Wars being fought with information and misinformation is a thing, but it’s nothing new.”
And then finally, is America back on its feet?
It could be argued that the States prospered in the 90s, and it may actually have been the nation’s best decade.
According to a 2015 article by The New York Times, the economy grew by an average of four percent per year between 1992 and 1999. Since then, the only year the economy grew that much was 2021, as the country recovered from the economic damage wreaked by Covid.
In that time, an average of 1.7 million jobs a year were added to the American work force, versus around 850,000 a year during this century up to 2015.
The unemployment rate dropped from nearly eight percent in 1992 to four percent — that is, effectively zero — at the end of the decade.
By 2020, it was back up to 6.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020.
So if America wasn’t on its feet in the 90s, is making ‘America great again’ really just an illusion?