I was a child of the 70s and there’s no nostalgia lost here. Oh the orange. (WHY SO MUCH ORANGE?)
Shag carpeting literally makes me feel a little sick, like…I’ve gotta get outta here! There is no way to keep that stuff clean. I’m normally not a germophoby person but I just look at shag and can almost hear the microbes multiplying.
But really the public architecture was the worst in the design category…the general idea seemed to be “I like how you’ve made it so cheap but could you possibly make it a little uglier and more unwelcoming?”
I was at Target looking at window curtains for the new place, and wondered WTF HAPPENED. The colours available were boring or orange or UGLY brown; the colours were straight from the 70’s Show. I’d been hoping to get something ‘not black’, as the room these were for already sucks up light, but ended up with navy. Nothing else wouldn’t have made me regret the purchase, yuck.
No kidding. Our shag carpetting came with the house and we never raked it or did anything apart from vacuum it. So it turned into “Wall-to-Wall Harvest Gold Dreadlocks” after a few years. We replaced it around 1980 with a short pile brown carpet.
There were so many!
Also Vivitar Series 1 Lenses and 283 flash, E-6 slide processing, easy to use color printing papers and processes, an abundance of choices for anything B&W … I think I’m gonna get sick with nostalgia.
I rented a house in London only about 10 years ago, and my bedroom had navy-blue shag-pile carpet in it so deep you could lose a badger in it (and previous tenants may well have done so).
Anyway, the 1970s. What was it with green, brown and orange in that decade? That’s a serious question. Had new and exciting dyes of those hues just been invented? I look at pictures from my childhood in the late 1970s and it’s astounding: black carpet with orange and yellow swirls, an avocado green wall, orangey-brown wooden arm-chairs upholstered with bright orange fabric… It must have been like living at the bottom of a bucket of vomit.
Just read some more posts, and now I have PTSD, thanks a ton! I’m having flashbacks from all the polyester 3-piece pantsuits that my mom sewed for me. In orange. And brown. And yellow. And avocado. /rocks in the corner, sobbing quietly
The greens, browns, tans, I could blame on the Earth Movement type stuff. Back to nature, live off the land, love Mother Nature, etc…
As for the orange? Maybe that comet that hit on the East coast that one summer brought with it some strange, oily, teased hair, orangey life forms with it?
Well, look at the colors from the 50s and 60s. The most important thing for new colors is that they have to be dramatically different from the last popular colors.
I remember in the early 90’s looking at an apartment that was seriously 70’s. The Fridge was avocado, the kitchen linoleum was harvest gold and the carpeting was deep, deep shag in a bright bloody orange color. It was so tacky, it was awesome.
