The Conquest of Cool

"Revolution" was probably the most overused word of the 1960s. There was a Creative Revolution in advertising as well as the Peacock Revolution in menswear, a sexual revolution, a revolution in rock music and agriculture and filmmaking and furniture design and fiction writing . . . A similar fetish for the language of radical transofmration was fully in place by 1966 in the trade literature of the men's clothing industry. -- Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997), p. 208.

One of Frank's main arguments is that advertising and industry were active players in the 1960s, not only responding to cultural change but also instigating it. For what purpose? To sell more products. What better way to sell more products than through hyper "self-obsoleting design?"











Frank notes a number of developments in the wake of the 60s, such as the longterm shift toward more casual street fashion. Indeed, long gone is "mandatory" haberdashery, replaced mostly by bare heads, baseball caps and "knit cap hats" for men and all sorts of miscellany for women. Let's not forget the ever-popular hawking of "Retro" items -- shorn of historical context and understanding, usually:

"Retro's vision of the past as a floating style catalog from which we can choose quaint wardrobes but from which we are otherwise disconnected is, in many respects, hip consumerism's proudest achievment: it simultaneously reinforces contemporary capitalism's curious ahistorical vision and its feverish cycling of obsolescence." (Frank, p. 227).

Today's Rune: Defense.