 The Swinging Sixties
 Fashion for the Youth
The eighties the new ideas and values spread to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and even China. The deeper meanings of Peace, Love and Community spread through the universality of the music, and the ideas of the pilgrims that had experienced or been influenced by the cauldron of the Sixties. Read More
Paris and London Effects
Although in politics and economics the 1920's were predominantly years of conservatism and caution, in cultural life, these years were marked by bold innovation. Paris still eclipsed Berlin in range of cultural activity. The city on the Seine remained what it had been for centuries--the literary and artistic capital of Europe. Indeed, in certain respects Paris increased its earlier lead. Read More
Fashion and the Counter-Culture
Counter-culture of opposition spread like wild fire with alternate lifestyles blossoming, people coming together and reviving their communal efforts, demonstrated in the Woodstock Art and Music Festival. 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 copied. But “hippy” dressing was a critique of the very fashion system it influenced. Read More
Design and Ephemerality
For many observers our sole original contribution to the spatial arts is the alternately praised and condemned skyscraper. Foreign critics find in this typically American construction either a triumph of engineering skill comparable to the Roman amphitheaters and baths, or designed architectural monstrosity. Read More
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
The "Good Design" Movement
The 1960s were all free love, flower power and pop music but, as the saying goes, if you remember it, you weren't there. The previous decade's love of American design was replaced, as Swinging London became the centre of all things groovy. 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
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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1960 - 1973
Periods
