Lifestyle Revolution
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€31.99
A01=Ben Highmore
Author_Ben Highmore
Category=AGA
Category=KCZ
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
consumerism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Habitat
lifestyle
Malcolm Bradbury
new middle class
New Society
Posy Simmonds
Sue Townsend
Terence Conran
TV cooking
Product details
- ISBN 9781526108821
- Weight: 726g
- Dimensions: 170 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 21 Feb 2023
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Lifestyle revolution charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, while sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from 'status anxiety', but underneath it all, a new order was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous pine kitchen tables. More than just a world of symbolic goods, this was an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes.
Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His books include The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (2017) and The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (2014).
