1945 - 1960 the suburban dream1945 - 1960 the suburban dream
  Style and HomeWith the war over, for women some things changed while others remained all too much the same... Read More
At the same time as Christian Dior was creating a nostalgic fashion and the French film industry was revitalizing itself, with period... Read More
In the 1950s reconstruction in Europe and the boom brought about by the Korean war boosted the fashion industries of the capitalist world. Read More
Even as the established couture houses tightened their hold, a new spirit was abroad, and their dominance came under attack. The New Look had been a sensational... Read More
In the America of the 1950s, it has been said, "each householder was able to have his own little Versailles along a cul-de-sac". For the first time, many middle-class American... Read More
The suburban consumer of the 1950s clearly had more money to spend on goods, and more goods from which to choose, than ever before, and consumption responded..t. Read More
The idea of planned object obsolescence had been a given in American design since the mid 1920s, when the highly secretive and competitive process of designing the... Read More
Poiret had commissioned leading avant-garde photographers to photograph his work in the early 1920s; however... Read More
In the United States the Beats, or Beatniks, were originaIly a West Coast phenomenon. Like the Parisian Existentialists of the Iate 1940s they were... Read More
While, in the interwar years, most consumer goods had been aimed at a female market (even if it didn't earn the money to pay for them), by the 1950s men... Read More
Among the new countries to embrace the concept of design in the 1950s was Japan.
Inevitably, due. to the presence of American troops on Japanese soil at that tirne, the ınodel of design it adopted originated in the United States... Read More
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 Screens Large and SmallAlthough 1946 was the most successful year ever at the box-office, Hollywood entered the Cold War era in a climate of unease. Considering that they were made in a period so commonly remembered for its placid, affluent certainties, the movies of the 1950s displayed unexpected anxieties, suggesting that, in Hollywood's... Read More
Suburban development and the rapidıy booming postwar economy boosted all forms of home entertainment and domestic hobbies, but no new consumer commodity has ever soId so fast or penetrated the available market so thoroughly as television did in the US in the 1950s. Read More
As television production moved from East Coast to West Coast, its dominant influences changed. The traditions of naturalist theatre, presenting action within an endosed set, were replaced by cinematic conventions and gemes. In 1956 the majors began selling their film libraries to programming syndicates, and films shown on TV became... Read More
If advertising pressure prevented television from offering explicit cultural criticism, Hollywood found not only a new source of talent in emigres from television, but also a new cultural function in providing its younger, more mobile and better-educated audiences with mild forms of social criticism. The studios' initial response was to concentrate on offering the public what television did not give them: color, the big screen, extravagant sets and lavish production values. Read More
While many movie theaters in small American towns closed in the 1950s, an equal number of a new kind of theater, which recognized the supremacy of the automobile in American life, opened up. In the 1920s concerned parents had been anxious about the effects of automobiles and movies on their children's morals; their grandchildren could now combine these menaces to their moral welfare at the drive-in. Read More
The renaissance of ltalian neo-realist cinema in the immediate postwar period excited American critics as much as Europeans, and stimulated the appearance in several American cities of small theaters showing European films to at least a small audience anxious to take the cinema seriously as art. Read More
Walk down any shopping street anywhere in the Westem world and there will be Marilyn Monroe - on posters and greetings cards, T-shirts, dresses and ads of all kinds.
After her death at least as much as during her life, the image of Marilyn Monroe has fueled prurient fantasy. An industry devoted to the exploitation of the enigma h
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 The Emergence of the Teenager There had been teenagers before the 1950s. The word "teenage" had first appeared in the popular press in the 1920s, but the idea that there was a time of life between childhood and adulthood that could be isolated, and that had its own peculiar characteristics, belongs largely to the 1950s... Read More
In 1940 ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), in league with the broadcasting networks, still exercised control over what most people heard in the United States. A relatively small number of songs received a disproportionately high number of broadcast performances. Bribery was by no means uncommon. Read More
In the wider social arena the war had emphasized the hypocrisy of participating ina crusade in the name of democracy and anti-racism, while at home blacks were the victims of systematic discrimination. Race riots in Detroit and elsewhere demonstrated the depths of black disaffection, but in the aftermath of the war blacks found that most of what little they had gained was transient.
Black music was being more widely heard, but it was still produced and marketed principaliy for a black audience. Segregation not only remained an acceptable marketing strategy, it also enabled... Read More
Radio and the record industry responded to these changes. From 1952, white disk jockeys began including black music in their programs. The most celebrated, Alan Freed, called his Cleveland broadcasts "Moondog's Rock'n' Roll Party", introducing into common currency a terrn that had long been familiar in black music circles (with sexual rather than musical nuances). Soon black records appeared regularly on the white charts. Read More
The radical fear that had been a feature of earlier hostiIity to popular music was again present, as before only partly cloaked in general deseriptions of rock 'n' roll as "barbaric" and "primitive".
But there were also important differences. While much of the language used echoed past struggles, there was a new tendency to draw on psychological terminology. Science - "objective", energetic, modem - was summoned in support of battered morality. Read More
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In this chapter: 
