Interior decoration and fashion as a factor in social unrest during the 1970s
Few people have commented on the pivotal role played by interior decoration and fashion in creating social unrest during the 1970s. Perusal of the background of the picture above, taken from a film made in 1972, reveals an unholy clash of colours and patterns in the wallpaper and curtains. This kind of unfortunate combination was fairly standard in Western housing interiors during the 1970s. What occurred under these circumstances was that people driven to nervous distraction, and suffering from high levels of irritability as a result of prolonged exposure to such aesthetic monstrosity were driven into the streets. There they banded together with similarly affected people and vented their rage against authority structures and representatives of order clad in a retro aesthetic of uniform and unpatterned blue.
Likewise fashion also played its role in provoking extreme manifestations during the decade. There is, for example, the well-known phenomenon of 'streaking' which first originated at sporting matches in the UK and Australia during the 1970s, whereby a single male spectator would divest himself of all his clothing and to the great appreciation of both crowd and players alike would rush across the field hotly pursued, once again, by those uniformly clad representatives of a superseded aesthetic. What few have understood is that this impulse was not the result of a sad exhibitionism, but the consequence of a sudden and frenzied desire to divest oneself of the intolerable accoutrements of seventies fashion and to celebrate this liberation for all to see. In the contemporary era, where fashion and individual are indissolubly welded, similar, although far more restrained displays by female pop divas at baseball matches in the country which now represents the geographical centre of modern imperialism are met with universal horror and condemnation by players, crowd and forces of order (now dressed in the height of fashion) alike.
Thanks
With thanks to Deirdre and to Haydn Chen for aiding and abetting in sparking off these ideas.
|
