Design Features A Look At Interiors Sixties Style

Date Published:

11/06/2008

Furniture & Style

In fashion and design terms the 1950s with its overhang of rationing, bomb damage and Cold War tensions had been a relatively austere and utilitarian period. As the country began to recover both physically and psychologically a time for more flippant, throwaway design began to evolve.

Credit: Sainsbury's

By the 1960s that relatively new concept the teenager was now pretty well established and beginning to influence manufacturers hungry for this new market. The first real link between the fashion catwalks and interior design began to be forged here. The Mods with their sharp looks and culture crossing music took their lead from designers like Mary Quant. Skirts began to shorten, suits began to get funky, imported rock & roll began to giveway to the homegrown pop of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

And so the young began to populate the new, more open plan interiors of their brutalist flats with the new flat pack furniture a concept borrowed from the Scandinavians inflatable furniture, bean bags, moulded plastic and nylon items in bright, vivid colours. In 1964 Terence Conran gave birth to Habitat a logical follow through of interest in things continental popularised by food writers like Elizabeth David and troops returning from foreign service.

Credit: Habitat

As the sixties began to swing this new explosion of popular culture began to expand across the Atlantic to inspire a harder edged, more media savvy New York set that would evolve into Andy Warhol's The Factory, Lichtenstein, Pop Art and influential noise masters The Velvet Underground.

Everywhere colours became bolder, designs started off with the geometric began to spin off into the psychedelic, everyday items were raised to iconic level, and all to the soundtrack provided by the new mass produced hi fis and colours TVs beginning to flood into the west from Japan.

The fashions and styles of the sixties were in some ways directly influenced by world events. The space race had accelerated the invention and proliferation of new man made materials and the intense and vivid use of colour at this time is seen by many as a direct reaction to the perceived monochrome of the war years, Chinese Communism and the Soviet expansionism in the East.

Credit: www.jacuzzi.co.uk

As the world's super powers became ever more militarised so fashion began to evolve into the hippy movement a peacefully anarchic form of self-expression that was as easily hand made as it was bought off a rack. As kaftans and cravattes began to proliferate on Carnaby Street, so materials like fur, cheesecloth and linen began to find their way into home decor. Free love and flower power translated easier onto Afghan rugs, bean bags and floor cushions than rigid polypropeline chairs.

Both the superstar photographer and the supermodel were born during this era, The David Baileys and the late Terence Donovan every bit as well known as Twiggy and The Shrimp. Movies like the highly successful James Bond franchise became just as well known for their product placing as their plotting. Meanwhile, 'modern art' was going through one of its many rebirths equally pushing the envelope and tweaking sensibilities. Bridget Riley's abstracts would challenge the eye while David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Peter Blake challenged you to see familiar things with different eyes.

Today just a short walk down a few aisles of any Habitat or Ikea will get you the full sixties look. Flared trousers flap in and out of fashion on five year cycles and today the modernists have dispensed with brutalism and now cloak their largely structural concrete cores beneath a thin, less obtrusive cloak of glass and steel.

With every classic British movie of the era up for a remake, Trellick Towers a listed building, Ralph Erskine still work at London's influential Greenwich Millennium Village, and Warhol's Marilyn beaming out from cushions at John Lewis, it seems that there will always be a corner of this country that is forever 1960 something.