6 Consuming postmodernity
The dream of modernity
The conditions were present for the arrival in Britain of that complex and pervasive phenomenon to which J. B. Priestley, returning in 1954 from a visit to the USA, affixed, by a happy stroke, the name of ‘Admass’.1
In the years following 1945, design, as a messenger of modernity, penetrated the lives of increasing numbers of people across the globe. Inevitably, the war years had seen a temporary reduction in mass consumption and more emphasis upon making do and mending. However, by the late 1940s and ’50s, consumption was becoming the main form of self and group identification for people across a broad social spectrum. The result was a further democratization of the expression of taste in the ...
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