70s Style & Design
CHAPTER 4: AVANT-GARDE
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In sharp, shrill contrast to hippie culture were the 70s avant-garde who delighted in all things brassily artificial. True, like hippies, they rebelled against force-fed consumerism and ‘straight’ society's conservatism but, while the former saw spirituality and the natural world as the keys to liberating society from mindless conformity, the avant-garde’s weapons of choice were androgyny, irony and the cults of camp (articulated by Susan Sontag in her essay Notes on Camp) and kitsch (popularised by Gillo Dorfles’ book about it), the latter hugely influencing punk. Other crucial influences on punk included France's 19th-century Decadent movement, Beat poetry, Dada, the Situationists, Andy Warhol and a 50s revival which relished the vulgarity of American Dream-style materialism so despised by hippies. Semiotics – which analysed the minutiae of pop culture, including fashion and style – also played a key role. As did art schools, which hugely increased their intake and spawned a highly visually literate generation of artists and designers, whose fetish for a trash aesthetic – from plastic jelly sandals to crazy-coloured hair – eventually culminated in punk. The latter in turn splintered into a plethora of subcultures, including neo-ska bands, a revival of the pre-psychedelic 60s, and the new romantics whose ultra-theatrical style was paralleled by an embryonic proto-80s fashion in interiors for neo-classicism.
Also includes: Alternative Miss World, Robyn Beeche, Ward Bennett, Edo Bertoglio, Bloolips, Guy Bourdin, David Bowie, The Cockettes, Divine, Edwige, Fabrice Emaer, Duggie Fields, Bill Gibb, David Hockney, Little Nell, Bianca Jagger, Betsey Johnson, Donna Jordan, Jordan, Karl Lagerfeld, Emmanuelle Khanh, Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, Andrew Logan, Antonio Lopez, Malcolm McLaren, Les Messageries, Bette Midler, Klaus Nomi, Pablo and Delia, Paloma Picasso, Antony Price, Lou Reed, Zandra Rhodes, The Rocky Horror Show, Roxy Music, Peter Saville, Rae Spencer Cullen, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Nanni Strada, Steve Strange, Keith Wainwright, John Waters, Vivienne Westwood .