Um, spoken like a true 30 year old who makes fun of shit 20 years ago, because its outdated and ridiculous. We all went through that stage. You missed out on the so dumb it’s cool again reprise a few years ago. It’s all post-ironic now.
Also, Rickjay, how right you are. We’re one step from wearing potato sacks out to dinner these days. Forget the polyester suits of the 70s, at least they tried.
Flip-flops, t-shirts in nice restaurants (and the acceptance of them), ill-fitting shorts either too long or too tight, the casual crap we have now will go down as the worst fashion for decades to come.
Me too! Vin Diesel fellating a Pepsi! If it moves, offer it a bong hit!
I agree with the poster who said that styles in the 70’s were a reaction to what parents had done. And styles in the 80’s were a reaction to the 70’s.
I also want to point out that those hideous colors found in home decor were supposed to be “natural”. Everything was about nature in the 70’s. The huge fro was supposed to show black hair in its natural state for example. That doesn’t explain the huge fros on white housewifes, I know. But the brown was like trees or maybe even dirt, the gold and orange were supposed to be fall leaves and the avocado was supposed to be, um, the avocado. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Say, Caricci, aren’t there clouds and sky and buttercups in nature?” To which I reply, “Hey, what do you want from me? I’m only 43 years old! I’m just reporting this to you.”
The clothing worn in public is some of the raunchiest stuff ever. I will take seventies style clothing over todays lack of fashion. I will not except a leisure suit though.
Just watched the footage from Love Bug Day at Disneyland. They invited people to decorate their Bugs, and the winner got a Herbie replica.
The winner is wearing a royal blue long-sleeve shirt tucked into white trousers with red, brown and blue vertical stripes. And he has respectably short hair with sideburns reaching below his ear lobes.
Whew! I would not be seen in public dressed like that! Nor in private either.
At least, nobody wore backwards baseball caps.
Oh, I should point out that Love Bug Day wasn’t actually in the '70s. It was March 1969. Pretty close, though.
I looked for my g/f, who was there, but didn’t see any little redheads running around.
I couldn’t say, Shagnasty. I really couldn’t. I just came in to note that, despite what certain of my enemies in CONTROL may tell you, I had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all. There is no truth whatsoever to the contention that the spread of disco, polyester, and Erik Estrada were part of an evil plan of mine to set myself up as God-King of Earth by numbing the minds of the populace. Anyone who says differently is a bald-faced liar.
I think the long drawn out war unsettled people, and screwed with their minds. And made them color blind. I can’t really explain disco, though, since it and I were born a couple years after the war ended.
There’s a new show coming to the BBC-A on Monday called “Life on Mars.” Apparently the premise is that the lead finds himself in 1973. Am I the only one who suspects that it’ll turn out that he’s actually gone to hell and that being in the 70s is his punishment?
I have my own theory that Frank Lloyd Wright and later his disciples caused much of the architectural carnage we see in the 1970’s. Frank Lloyd Wright is considered a genius because he thought most of this up in the 1920’s - 1950’s but is that really a good thing with the subject matter we are dealing with? Sure, untalented hacks took his ideas and made them even worse but even the untainted ideas were pretty horrific in general. The only thing I think is cool about his work is that you could see a horse and buggy pulled up to one of his Brady Bunch houses in his earlier houses.
Actually, aside from the decorating thereof, I think architectural styles of the 1970’s were actually pretty cool. Remember the Brady Bunch house? Very cool. I loved the open living room with that open-tread staircase with the floating rectangular wood bannister. I remember lots of 70’s houses like that. I have a friend who owns a 5-level split that was built in the 70’s, and it’s really neat. All the levels look down into the level below, so the whole house feels incredibly open. And it’s got large solid wood railings, lots of glass, a sunken family room that’s a step down from the rest of the level. Really nice.
It’s just that once they had these cool spaces, they tended to fill them with hideous crap and ugly colors.
I think one of the things that drove 70’s design and fashion was technology. Remember when the first word processors came out, and everyone’s letters looked like ransom notes? Hey, we’ve got so many font choices! How many can we squeeze onto a page??
Well, the 70’s had a bunch of equivalents. Polyester being the main one, and it’s responsible for much evil in the world. But polyester allowed designers to do things they couldn’t do before - and so they did. The same goes with printing technology. We came up with cheap methods for printing patterns on everything from wallpaper to tablecloths to rugs - and so we did. Couple that with the post-70’s young boomer lifestyle, and you have a prescription for hideousness.
But in a way, that hideousness is a bit charming. You can tell just by looking at pictures of the 70’s that people were having a really good time. Everyone was into self-expression. What I remember most was that there was an overbearing sense that the 70’s were the future. We were putting men on the moon. Things were changing incredibly fast. We were all convinced we’d be flying around in bubble cars and living in space in just a decade or two. Everything was grandiose. The 60’s already seemed old and quaint. We were moving, baby. Everything was in high gear. The lifestyles were excessive, sex was everywhere, and we were just so damned cool. I remember in the 70’s that if a band that had charted in the 60’s, less than a decade before, put out an album, they were treated as a nostalgia act. The Beach Boys were totally uncool - we were listening to Deep Purple’s “Machine Head” and Black Sabbath.
So things were changing fast, and everyone was in an experimental mood. That’s why there were so many excesses of fashion and style. By the 80’s, things were trending into a more conservative direction, and baggy cotton pants and sweaters were replacing polyester liesure suits.
Then in the 90’s, style came back - mainly I think because we dropped the gimmicks and experimentation. Society felt much more stable - we weren’t going to put men on mars or live in dome houses after all. There was more of a sense that the world in 50 years was probably going to look a lot like it does today, so people stopped trying to force change and instead just started focusing on quality and utility. Hence the more casual styles.
I was looking through a friend’s wedding album when I discovered she had made each of her bridesmaids wear one of these colors. 70’s colors on 70’s dresses combined with 70’s hairstyles!
Years later, I’m still squicked out about it.
Oh no no nooooo. I mean ORANGE orange, Florida Orange orange. That’s the color of a naugahyde recliner we had, our carpet too, though it was slighly more toned down. :eek:
Also, those weird triangular metal fireplace things were often that color as well. They also came in bright green (no, not avacodo), and dark red (with burnt burgandy accents around the edges) was also very popular.
Harvest Gold was the least of the horrible colors. At least in our house it was a darkish yellowy gold. Still gross, but way better than avacodo, or that hideous brown. I don’t know about where you lived, but we were hardpressed to find nice normal white.
The most horrible thing was that they mixed them all together. My room in high school was a soft mint or sea foam green. And my sister went all the way to the moon with a wild indigo blue. NOT 70s fare for either of us.
I also dressed a bit out of the ordinary most of the time (no polyester, but bell bottoms couldn’t be gotten away from, it was that, or no pants at all just about). But I loved the 40s look, and could sew. So…as much as I could afford to, I went way different from my peers.
The trouble with Harvest Gold was that it was everywhere. Seeing houses that still have 70s decorations, or looking around on Lileks.com, you can see that not just the appliances but the walls and ceilings were those colors too! The effect of a room in which everything is mustard yellow with a few spots of burnt orange and avocado is just so oppressive. It’s just so unpleasant being surrounded by that much yellow.
[QUOTE=Mehitabel]
(at least people weren’t too fat in those days) QUOTE]
Excellent point. A couple days ago, I was going through a box of stuff my parents gave me and found my high school year book; I graduated 1980. Virtually none of the kids, including me, were obese. The faculty, men and women who were middleaged at the time, were also pretty slender. Photographs of crowds at sporting events didn’t show any noticeable number of fatasses of any age. People in the US today should try for a return to the physiques of the 70’s.
I read recently (CNN?) that surfers have an excellent workout regime and get exercise ‘acciddentally’ because they love surfing so much. Coincidentally I took Endless Summer and my PowerBook to the laundromat today so that I’d have some way of passing the time. (I want to go back to my house! Much cooler up there, and I have a laundry room.) Maybe we should return to the '60s surf culture. 
(Hey, as long as I’m down here maybe I’ll see if I can find a place that teaches Fat Boring Old Farts With Destroyed Knees how to surf…)
That website shows Hartwig’s Gobbler from the late 1960s, not the 70s. Let’s not get our decades confused. (I drive by the Gobbler frequently.)
Eh, not really. The flying bubble car thing was more of a thirties to fifties dream. By the 1970s, artist Bruce McCall was already making fun of that futuristic style in National Lampoon and other magazines.
The Beach Boys album Endless Summer went to #1 on the Billboard pop albums chart in 1974. Spirit of America (1975) and 15 Big Ones (1976) both reached #8.
Their recording of “Rock and Roll Music” went to #5 on the pop singles chart in 1976. They had three other Top 40 hits in the '70s.