Post modernism was a white flag to design.
It was a long time coming, inevitable and a breath of fresh air.
It's also something that has occured multiple times through history. Mannerism from the 16th century for example.
Monumentalism was pastiche. Change the typeface make it orange and it's the spirit of '66.
That's not monumentalism. But yes, the eighties consumer goods and designs reference Googie style and pop art a lot. You could say it was almost a continuation of those styles, after a break in the seventies, with some Art Deco and some high-tech neon thrown in.
Really very much a medley/riff of the best of the twentieth century, expertly rolled into one homogenous style.
More fin de siècle. The 1930s meets the jet age. Dan Dare lemon squeezers for people who obsess how many cuff buttons are appropriate for leisure wear.
You just referenced the whole first half of the twentieth century, in the first part of the above.
It's hard to say exactly what Colanis style grew out of, but it seems to be at least partly, related to the whole fascination with the freedom of plastic and plastic moulding that fully unfolded in the 60s, coupled with the psychedelic auto drawing, blobby doodle style trend.
He was far from the most talented at that though. My own countries Verner Panton for instance was far more talented.
Fussy homages to Auto Union. A shadow of what they were in the 1960s and early 70s, when Japanese cars looked genuinely Japanese. Was it the Datsun Laurel that had embossed dragons on its vinyl seats? They subsequently became self conscious and Europhile, neither fish nor fowl.
While there is cuteness and great sense of distilled essence in for example the Honda S500, it still also looks much like cars from either side of the Atlantic from the same time. And those basic traits where definitely not lost in the 80s.
The japanese have always been great at playing on preconceived notions and clichés on the archetypical Japanese. Both internally and externally in exported goods (Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of the quintessential electronic groups of the seventies and eighties, started just like that. A homage/parody of Debussy's orientalistic music and other western notions on the typical Japanese) .
The vinyl dragons I suspect is just that. Post modern if anything.
Jung's symbols are universal. It read more like Derrida's existential shrug.
Jungs ideas encompass both universal and personal symbols and notions, and those in the third place.
I think you need to brush up on Jung.
I have nothing against Derridas thinking (some would say it is even quite banal at heart), but he is very misrepresented and misunderstood by people often citing him as influence. His ideas being employed in a misrepresented way, by so called deconstructionist architects, is shameful in a profound way,.
We have on one hand "firmware" tendencies. IE what we are naturally attracted, repulsed or indeed just react to.
That is more or less universal
Then there is the complex social fabric of more or less solid notions, ideas, shapes, patterns and colour combinations that our culture is build on. In other words: History in the very broad sense.
The last is to a surprisingly large extent also universal, especially in recent times. But of course shaped by local circumstance.
For example even a little kid could make a very good guess, if some cultural artefact is Chinese or Egyptian.
Design is simply references to those two: Appeals to inherent human tendencies, and references to history.
The main reason is fabric suddenly became available again post-WW2. Women wanted to stop looking like men. Chanel, totalitarian that she was, took that puritanical view that the way to show a lady's wealth was to strip it back to nothing. Woman as machine. Interesting article:
https://catholicherald.co.uk/magazine/coco-chanel-the-savonarola-of-fashion/
That is at least the commonly told story. One should always be careful in blindly accepting those stories, which are just cited ad verbum without much provenance attached.
Puritanical traditions, certainly. The dubious assumption that less is more. For people who assume churches should be austere, with all their fairground exuberance and doom paintings whitewashed to rationality.
I think you need to see the homes and interiors of the straw men you chalk up here.
Less is more van der Rohe, was very inspired by traditional Japanese architecture. The cultural ideals of Iki, and Wabi-Sabi running trough his architecture.
So not much to do with Lutheranism or Calvinism.
Look at where his contemporary friend Le Corbusier ended up though!
Crumplezones. Brutalism. Brutalism with knobs on (postmodernism). Fire retardant boudoir clothing.
Again I fail to see what that has to do with challenges in and to industrial design?
"Brutalism with knobs", very humorous, but not very apt. Brutalism/Béton brut or raw concrete is not inherent to post modernist architecture.
It could be, and often
is used as a reference to the sixties and seventies architecture. You might say PoMo Architecture is sometimes brutalism with paint and tiles. Less snappy, but more true.
In retrospect. I remember the T-series coming out, and they looked tacky. I like them now because they are tacky. That's what 40 years of sentiment can do. The goggles were just silly. It's the reason why Leica offered progressively wider focal lengths in the rangefinders.
I don't think we're going to agree on the life-enhancing qualities of corporations.
It was and is
supposed to look "tacky". That is the whole point!
Sophisticated whimsy is often lost, or misinterpreted sadly, because it looks "on the nose" to people with a stick up their arse, or little sophistication.
Those same people are often heard uttering words such as "decadence" or "academic" when they are told the "correct" viewpoint/interpretation.
A classic example is Batman 66 and the original Star Trek. Some of the first really mainstream pop culture products to employ post modernistic elements in the modern sense.
They made a virtue out of the low production resources available and the whole rather silly (when you really think about it) premise of both shows.
My guess is that many, perhaps most, of the viewers didn't, and still don't
get it, especially among the young.
