1960 - 1973 the revolution of youth1960 - 1973 the revolution of youth
  Swinging Sixties4 Fashion for the Youth
The music and youth subcultures of the 1950s and early 1960s generated a number of dress styles, especially in Britain. That of the teddy boys never lost its outlaw status, but the mod fashions of a slightly later period, which originated among art students, fertilized mainstream fashion and created a new cheap instant high fashion. Read More
4 Paris and London Effects
After World War II Chanel had been in eclipse, (owing in part to her wartime association with a Nazi officer), but in 1953 she decided to re-open the doors of her salon. Her first collection seemed to be a disaster - the simple little dresses and suits were quite out of tune with the carapace -like creations of Dior, Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain, and the show was panned. Read More
4 Fashion and the Counter-Culture
Various specific fashion styles developed within counter-cultural groups, often organized around pop-music styles and bands, and these became a growing influence on houte couture. The hippy look of flowing scarves, loose, flowery robes and flowing sleeves and trousers was widely copied. But “hippy” dressing was a critique of the very fashion system it both plundered and influenced. Read More
4 Design and Ephemerality
The democratization of design became a reality for the first time in the economic boom years of the 1960s, as goods with a strong visual content reached a more youthful audience. Through increased consumption young people in Europe and the United States began to manifest their newly acquired wealth and to assert their “alternative” values. Read More
4 Fashion Photographers
Between the wars, and even more in the 1950s, the love affair of black-and-white photography with high fashion gave birth to the frozen perfection of the fashion image. The sharp lines, dark shadow and white light dramatized the angular, exaggerated creations of the New Look period particularly well. Read More
4 The "Good Design" Movement
By the mid 1960s the concept of design as a commodity “added”to consumer objects to increase thir value had become economically and culturally integrated into all the capitalist countries of the industrialized world. Design differentiated products in competition with each other, or else served as a form of national self-identification on the world market. Read More
4 The Alternative Design Movement
In the early 1970s a growing consciousness of the distance between Western conspicous consumption and underdevelopment in the Third World encouraged a number of designers to rethink the social and moral functions of design. Perceptions of the world as a global village gave designers a different idea of their role than as the adjuncts of manufacturing industry. Read More
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 Sports and the Third World 4 Sports Behind the Iron CurtainRussia was a founder member of the modern Olympic movement, but after the Russian Revolution of October 1917, no Soviet team took part in the Olympics until 1952. Initially, there was an explicit rejection of “bourgeois” sports: the Soviets boycotted important Western competitions. Read More
4 The Politicization of Sports
With the nation state the primary unit of international sport, nationalism provided the most conspicuous form of political interference. Sophisticated ceremonial, ritual displays of nationalism, pageantry, medals... Read More
4 Munich and the Olympic Boycotts
The suggestion that, since sport is self-evidently political, the political terms of engagement must be acceptable before agreeing to the rules of competition emerged most strongly in the 1960s over the issue of apartheid and southern Africa. The anti-apartheid sports... Read More
4 Sports and the Media
As an increasing number of countries came to participate in international competition, sport became a global phenomenon in another sense.Satellite television, new developments in electronic technology and rapid and relatively inexpensive travel... Read More
4 Sporting Superstars: Pele & Muhammad Ali
In the 1960s there emerged two sportsmen - both black men from unpromising backgrounds - who each won vast fortunes and became amongst the best known faces and names in the world. The two of them... Read More
 Music Can Change the World4 The Folk Revival
The sixties were to see American popular music receive an unprecedented degree of attention. They began inauspiciously enough, dominated by the inoffensive sounds of “Philadelphia schlock”. This was a neutralized, watered-down version of rock'n' roll. Read More
4 The Protest Movement
The sense of possessing qualities equal to but set apart from those of established culture was an important element in the counter - culture of the later 1960s. But as increasing store was set by poetic... Read More
4 Popular Culture in Britain
In the early 1960s British popular culture emerged from the long winter of postwar austerity, rejvenated by the assertive claims to attention of the young working class. Responding to prime minister... Read More
4 Here Comes Beatlemania!
The surge of British “beat” music which followed the meteoric rise of the Beatles (from number 19 in the charts in December 1962 to unchallenged supremacy by the late summer of 1963) was greeted with much national wonderment on... Read More
4 British Beat Conquers the World
The Beatles-led British invasion of American airwaves and record stores in the 1960s influenced all aspects of the American popular music scene... Read More
4 California Dreamin'
It was to California that the focus of musical attention shifted in the middle of the decade. The state had a laid-back image, at a time when ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary was extolling the virtues of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out with... Read More
4 Rocking Round the World
By early 1967, with no small contribution from the news media, the San Francisco area was being celebrated as the center of the new lifestyle. “Flower-power”, that intoxicating antithesis to all that was conventional, attracted would-be hippies from all over, and also had a sweet smell of dollars to a record industry not averse to striking an anti-Establishment stance. Read More
4 Soul and Tamla Motown
"Soul" - by the late fifties the word had a rich resonance in black society. As the fervent optimism and vocal intensity of gospel joined with the secular energy of rhythm & blues, a powerful idiom emerged... Read More
4 Rock Festivals: Woodstock, Live Aid
For a few years, the large, outdoor rock festival - an idea borrowed from the tradition of folk and jazz festivals begun in the 1950s and from San Francisco's “human be-in” gatherings or “happenings” - became a symbolic expression of the counter-culture. Read More
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 The Networks and the New Wave 4 Hollywood Faces Disaster
By 1960 television had “liberated” cinema by taking over its function as mass entertainment. Without a clear idea of what its post-television role should be or how to satisfy its increasingly disparate audience, Hollywood was in limbo for much of the next decade. The old studio moguls were either dead, in retirement, or battling to maintain a tenuous control over their companies. With them had gone confidence about production. Read More
4 The New Youth Audience
As the studio system disintegrated in a morass of agents, deals and “packaging”, the machinery which had once regulated Hollywood production crumbled. The Production Code had survived more or less intact though the 1950s, but became increasingly untenable against the industry's need to cater to a more permissive audience hostile to anything it could label “censorship”. Read More
4 Art Cinema and the New Wave
In France, a New Wave of filmmakers, many of them former critics, emerged in 1959 when François Truffaut's 400 Blows won the Best Direction prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As critics on the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard had attacked the dominant tradition in French film of respectful adaptations of "quality" novels, and asserted that the true creators of cinema were its directors. Read More
4 Television in the Sixties
It would be some time before anyone tried to make the same case for American television, which had changed little from the way Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had described it to its producers in 1961, as “a vast wasteland”.
Minow had just been appointed to his post by John F. Kennedy, and many in his audience might have expected gentler treatment from a president who had been elected, they believed, on the strenght of his appeal on television. Read More
4 Vietnam: Bringing the War Home
Vietnam, the first rock'n' roll war, was also the first television war, with combat footage on the nightly news. Johnson tried assiduously to manage television coverage of the war, pundits debated endlessly about whether television had “brought the war home” or had trivialized it as just another interruption in the stream of commercials, and whether the scenes of carnage and the reports of American atrocities had numbed its audience or had increased anti-war sentiment or street violence. Read More
4 American Television and the Wider World
In the early 1970s there was a renaissance of comedy on American television, much of it coming from Americanized versions of British programs. All in the Family (1970-77) took its formula and characters from the BBC's Till Death Do Us Part, first screened in 1964. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the first sitcom to feature an independent woman as its main character, also began in 1970. Read More
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