Everything you need to know about the worst year ever – from the clothes to wear (tracksuits and Vetements) to what to watch (puddles on Periscope).

Here we are again, another year older, another mite sourer, but hopefully a few pairs of shoes and some nice MR PORTER bags better off. Soon it will be time to shudder and forget it all, of course, but before you do, we thought it only polite to present you with a checklist of all the developments we consider essential to an understanding of 2016. If such a thing, in all honesty, really exists. Scroll down for our highlights and lowlights of this not-entirely-beatific year, from Danish cosiness to virtual reality, music hype and more.

In normal circumstances, death would not be a go-to topic on a fun, year-review listicle. But this year, well, death happened. A lot. And to a lot of beloved people. Mr David Bowie kicked off the trend on 10 January, and many decided to follow suit. Mr Alan Rickman, Mr Leonard Cohen, Mr Gene Wilder, Prince, Mr Muhammad Ali – you name them, if someone was a culturally relevant, they probably died. Even Mr Fidel Castro – who survived countless assassination attempts by the CIA over decades – couldn’t survive 2016’s scythe.

Maybe it was a reaction to the death and uncertainty that surrounded us, but 2016 was the year we adopted the Danish philosophy of hyyge (pronounced hoo-gah) – which is basically the pursuit of everyday happiness by being as cosy as possible. If there’s a reason Danes are statistically more cheerful than us then it may well be this. The British media’s response to the craze? Opinion pieces suggesting it was a cynical marketing ploy to sell more candles. I guess we just love being miserable.

With the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime dwarfing the budgets of most traditional TV networks, and rivalling that of Hollywood, 2016 was the year TV blew film out of the water. It isn’t just about the money, of course. The watch-whenever nature of web series suits modern culture far more than booking a ticket for a film and spending £9.87 on a bag of popcorn. And a narrative created over several hours is always going to be richer than one formed in two. The big hits of the year? The Crown, produced for Netflix with a budget of around $100 million, the futuristic Westworld (HBO), the cult and oh-so curious Stranger Things (Netflix). #PrayforBarb

Back in June, Mr Michael Gove – British Conservative politician and then-Brexit campaigner – said, after being asked which economists backed Britain’s exit from Europe, “People in this country have had enough of experts”. It seemed to be true, and summed up what some people perceived to be a “post-truth” brand of politics, which, influenced by social media, dominated our news cycles. Add to this the rise of “fake news” – fabricated stories being taken as gospel – and 2016 was a rather confusing place to be.

After the anti-album release (basically hyping your album by, well, not hyping it whatsoever and just releasing it unannounced) became a trend well-worn by the likes of Beyoncé, Mr Kanye West and Rihanna, Mr Frank Ocean decided to fragment the genre and outdo everyone by announcing the release of his 2016 album Boys Don’t Cry in an even more humdrum fashion. With a video of him doing DIY. Enough already. We pine for the return of hysterical marketing campaigns.

You might have thought that people would be tired of queueing for things in 2016, given that this awful social convention has been ubiquitous since about 2010. But no, the world population is reaching seven and a half billion and, it seems, there’s not enough of the good stuff to go around to avoid people having to stand in line. There’s not even enough of the fairly bog-standard stuff. Two incidents in the past year highlight this fact: first, the pop-up appearance of cult LA burger joint In-N-Out Burger in London in September, which prompted queues of up to three miles long and five hours waiting time. For a burger and chips. Then came the transplant of British chain Wagamama to New York. Eater New York’s senior critic described the food as “dumbed-down Anglo-Japanese cuisine intrinsically less interesting to New York’s sophisticated ramen-slurping public”, before remarking “Yet, the lines formed anyway.”

Anyone who was born in the UK before 1990 will probably remember a pre-lapsarian Ms Carol Vorderman presenting us with the very first views of “virtual reality” on the BBC television programme Tomorrow’s World (1965-2003). Or, perhaps, the schlocky, gooey-sex filled VR horror film The Lawnmower Man (1992). Given we were so excited about it all back then, how on earth has it taken so long for us to receive our first commercial VR headsets? And why does anyone still care? Anyway, thanks to things like Samsung’s Galaxy VR Gear (released end of 2015) and the Oculus Rift (released March 2016, sort of), you can now, finally, immerse yourself in wonderful virtual things. Like a 360-degree version of Minecraft. And a couple of cartoons from Google. Meanwhile every ad agency in the country is having “VR Post-it sessions” and desperately trying to figure out how they can extract more money out of this new experiential frontier. To be honest, we’d rather have had some of those singing toilets they have in Japan, but beggars can’t be choosers I suppose.

Whether you are enamoured or appalled by the somewhat outré, disruptive stylings of Parisian brand Vetements, it’s clear that Mr Demna Gvasalia is at the front of a movement to bring streetwear into the world of luxury fashion. Among MR PORTER’s selection of more traditional designer and luxury brands, we now offer iconic label Stüssy and Japanese designer SK8thing’s enigmatic streetwear line Cav Empt. Meanwhile designers such as Vetements and Gucci are offering embellished tube socks, Givenchy is indulging in lo-fi graphic tees, and brands across the board are offering new versions of the tracksuit.

In response to the varied sorts of political and economic turbulence erupting all over the globe in 2016, we at The Daily had only one question: what will the style and entertainment industry’s multi-hyphenates do about it? The answer was clear and simple – a swift change to the Instagram bio of everyone with more than 10,000 followers. In 2016, it wasn’t enough to be a model-singer-influencer-actor. You had to throw an “activist” in there, too. Luckily, through this concerted effort (seemingly uninterrupted by a series of high-street campaigns, brand endorsements and sponsored posts), they managed to solve all the world’s problems. It’s amazing what a little social media clout will do.

A second school of technological thought in 2016. What if, instead of descending into a fictional universe via your VR headset, you simply witnessed our own simple plane of existence, but LIVE? Yes, everything is much more exciting when you see it LIVE, from fashion shows to people putting elastic bands on a watermelon, to… a puddle… LIVE from Newcastle. The lattermost, a sizeable but otherwise unremarkable body of water streamed via Periscope on 6 January, was actually our favourite, not just because it started off 2016 with a bang, but it was much more entertaining than almost everything that followed. 2017, bring back #DrummondPuddleWatch please.