Decade of Design Revolution.
In the early 1960s Mary Quant coined the phrase "the look" to describe her revolutionary new ready-to-wear youth fashions. "The look" was something that money alone could not buy; it was as much about attitude as about clothes. As with the earlier "Contemporary" style of the 1950s, it affected furniture and fabrics as well as fashion.
This book traces the transition from "Contemporary" design to "the look", and the rise of Italy and Britain as the two new international design superpowers of the sixties. While the USA continued to lead in architecture and the Scandinavian Modern style remained dominant within the applied arts, the explosion of British fashion and pop culture and the vibrancy of Italian furniture and plastics added a whole new dimension to design. The mid-1960s was a provocative and inspiring time, when vivid visual ideas proliferated. Op art fabrics, paper furniture, inflatable houses, mini skirts, plastic chairs, pop glass and psychedelic posters were among the new design phenomena.
In 1968, a year of social unrest, a second design revolution was sparked. It was a period characterised by reaction, rejection and revivalism. Designers began to question their assumptions, exploring alternative ideas about form, materials, colour and texture. This found expression in the birth of the Anti-Design movement in Italy, the craft movement in the USA, the ergonomic movement in Scandinavia, and the Art Nouveau and Art Deco revival in Britain. This book elucidates the cycle of action and reaction that predominated in this decade of design revolution.
