I was born in 65. I barely remember the 60s, remember the 70s fairly well, and have great memories of the 80s. I lived a normal suburban, middle-class life in the southeast US.
I know it's quite common for older generations to look at younger ones and say they're all rotten -- goes back as far as the Greeks, probably much farther. What I'm wondering about is how the younger generation has viewed their predecessors over time.
When I consume mass media that describes the 60s, 70s, or 80s? The fashion and behavior of characters is a caricature of what it was actually like. Showing a scene from the 80s? Everybody has big hair and wears workout clothes. Casting a TV show in the 70s? It's polyester suits and disco. You can't have anything set in the 60s without tie-dyed shirts, pot, and long-haired kids.
Sure, these fashions existed, but by and large they were only the extremes of decades that saw several fashion trends. My question: have other generations had comically-exaggerated views of the ones before them? Or is this just a thing that's happened in the last few decades?
I'm not sure how far back it goes, but people did exaggerate and stereotype the clothing of previous generations earlier in the twentieth century. Probably the most similar to the present tendency is the cultural memory of the "Gay Nineties" (in America - in Britain it was the "Naughty Nineties", and the belle epoque in France) in the 1920s through the middle of the century. The term "Gay Nineties" appears as early as 1895 in a Cornell yearbook; there's a certain sarcasm to the early references, but by the time the "Bill's Gay Nineties" speakeasy opened in Manhattan in 1924 the references become neutral and even wistful.
The nostalgia for the period is variously attributed to the lack of Prohibition, vaudeville's heyday, the birth of cinema ... it was portrayed as a romping good time. In some cases, people simply ignored the naughtiness - take, for instance, the lyrics of "That Was Long Ago", a song about the quaintness of the '90s from the Arlen/Gershwin/Harburg revue Life Begins at 8:40:
They believed that love
Was a sacred flame.
And they married first –
Then the baby came.
That was long ago,
That was far away,
Once upon a time.
So, anyway, clothes! You were asking about clothes. While fashion is ever in a state of flux, there were certain aspects of women's dress that had stayed fairly similar for a generation and changed around 1900: darker colors, heavier fabrics, the general shape of corsetry. Then in the coming years, corsets were to change even more, hairstyles simplified, hats simplified, etc. etc. (Men's dress went through a similar process of streamlining and casualifying, but less drastically and it attracted less attention as part of the Gay Nineties phenomenon.) Women's clothing of the 1890s, helped out by the proximity to a turning-point date, seemed like the very last gasp of a Victorian sensibility that was alien to young adults and even adults in early middle age in the twentieth century, and it fascinated them - in particular the "leg o'mutton" sleeves of 1893-1896, which even managed to come back to mainstream fashion in the late 1900s and mid 1930s.
You can see the fetishization of 1890s culture in movies like The Harvey Girls (1946), Gigi (1958), The Imperfect Lady (1947), Belle of the Nineties (1934), Charley's Aunt (1941); I'd even push it out to Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), which is technically set in 1903-1904. What's notable to me, and what makes it clear that there's more pull to the 1890s in particular than simply nostalgia in general during this time, is that these movies make a real attempt at portraying accurate dress, where a lot of mid-20th century movies set in the early 20th century put the lead actors in currently fashionable clothing. See The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), Easter Parade (1948), For Me and My Gal (1942), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946).