Avocado kitchens! Shag rugs! Dacron leisure suits! Earth shoes!

 

At long last, the author of the beloved celebration of 1950s and ’60s design Populuxe turns his sights on that most confusing and confused decade of all: the 1970s.

 

The ’70s were tough, man. The president resigned; we lost a war; there were gas lines, urban squalor, bizarre crimes, and soaring inflation. The country fell into a great funk. But when things fall apart, you can take the fragments and make something fresh. Plaid maxi-dresses and macramé may have been ugly, but they signaled new modes of seeing and being. The 1970s were all about reinvention.

 

In The Great Funk, Thomas Hine scrutinizes the looks and life of this complex era, climbing into the heads (and platform shoes!) of those who experienced the ’70s—exploring the design of our homes and our fashions and scanning the ads that set our desires on fire.

 

The Great Funk is more than a lavish catalog of 1970s culture and design: it’s a brilliantly original, wonderfully lively look at the “Me Decade” through the eyes of the man House & Garden has called “America’s sharpest design critic.”