Unadorned simplicity still inspired serious designers but the ever- younger mass of consumers with the spending power imposed their own taste for ease and, above all, fun.

Victorious and wealthy, the United States emerged from the Second World War in 1945 as the most powerful nation, and its influence spread quickly across much of the globe. The USA was the world leader in industrial technology, and was also the main maker of films, whose images of style and manners fed the dreams and aims of the Western world’s cinema-going millions.

With industry in optimistic mood, US designers continued to explore new materials and production techniques. They were joined by several of the most original European designers, who had been driven from their homes by Fascism in the 1930s.

New Shapes to Fit the Body

The American furniture designer Charles Eames took a particular interest in chairs to fit the human body. His new concept in seating has simple, moulded plywood shells on steel- rod stands. More luxurious versions such as his ‘Chair 67o’ have buttoned leather upholstery cradled in rosewood-veneered plywood on a base of cast aluminium. Experiments with form led Eames to his ‘Lounging Shape’ chair — a hollowed blob on a spindly base.

Like all Modernist designs, such chairs focused on function and shunned decoration, but they are more rounded than the severe early Modernist furniture. Because their shapes echoed those of waves, eggs, plants and other natural forms, their style was called `Organic Modernism‘. Its rounded lines were seen in a range of design fields from strikingly curvaceous buildings to free-form glassware.

Antique Collector MagazineEames worked with a number of like- minded designers including Finnish-born Eero Saarinen and German immigrant Hans Knoll and his Swiss-born wife Florence. The Knolls went on to found an international furniture manufacturing company which in 195o produced Harry Bertoia’s startlingly novel `Chickenw ire’ chair, a diamond-shaped moulded shell of coated steel mesh resting on a spindly frame. In 1957 the Knolls manufactured Saarinen’s ‘Tulip’ chair, whose white, bucket-like, glass-fibre seat rises from an aluminium stalk with a flared circular base.

Mass production ensured that such pieces had a much wider influence than previous Modernist furniture. They also had a clean- cut, efficient look which made them popular for offices and public buildings — and the style is still recognisable in today’s office furniture.

While progressive designers pursued functionalism, American industry pursued a mass market that was eager to spend and more interested in fun than form. The age of consumerism had arrived, fostered by advertising, particularly through television. The consumers relished a postwar style that was all their own, owing little to elitist imports of the past. The style often focused on novelty— as in the lavish Wurlitzer jukeboxes and the fanciful tail-fins of outsize automobiles.

During the 195os, manufacturers, retailers and advertisers recognised a huge new consumer group — teenagers, whose easy-going culture embraced rock-and-roll music and simple, workaday clothing. Their blue jeans, T-shirts, and big ’sloppy joe’ jumpers were to become a fashionable style that has long been an acceptable classless uniform.

The Festival of Britain

Meanwhile Europe had to tackle wartime damage while stricken by postwar poverty. Britain was grimly determined to ‘win the peace’ in the face of continued rationing and the need to rehouse some 200,000 people. `Utility’ production of necessities, with controlled use of materials, had begun in 1945 and still continued. Utility furniture, made from 1943, was basic and well designed with an Arts and Crafts air, but for the public it was an unloved reminder of wartime austerity.

One bright point in these years was the six-month Festival of Britain, held beside the Thames in 5955, 100 years after the Great Exhibition. The Royal Festival Hall is a survivor of the exhibition’s concrete, glass and steel buildings. Seen by some 8 million people, the exhibition’s modern designs had a wide impact on style.

The bead-and-rod models of molecular structure in the ‘Dome of Discovery’ inspired the steel-rod base and ball feet of chairs and coffee-tables. The image was popularised into the ‘cocktail-cherry’ style of black plastic- coated rods tipped with bright plastic beads, used for magazine and record racks, rows of coat hooks and wall decorations.

The Festival’s show buildings were decorated with flat panels of faded red, pastel blue and milky green, all further muted by the presence of black. These colours appeared together in abstract shapes on textiles and singly, overlaid with small, black markings, in curtains, upholstery and Formica panels. The same colours are found in pottery, for example in Poole pottery designed by A. B. Rhead.

Europe’s New Look

When austerity eased in Britain and manufacturing picked up in the mid- 1950s, the American influence was strong. Furniture designers adapted the ideas of Charles Eames and others for the mass market, and also wedded metals, plastics and laminated woods to familiar shapes. Ernest Race, for instance, used bent steel and moulded plywood to echo Queen Anne winged chairs. Such designs, although modern, had not the dramatic impact of Chickenw ire and Tulip chairs.

More progressive ideas came from Italy, where designers worked not for the mass market but for a wealthy, pace-setting clientele. Designers such as Carlo Mollino created tables, chairs and lamps with smooth, sculptural silhouettes. The delicately poised lamps have become classics of modern design.

The Scandinavian style of furnishing, considered avant-garde at the beginning of the 1950s, had by the end of them been merged with some US features to make the mainstream ‘Contemporary’ style.

In clothes, Paris had the strongest say. After wearing the fabric-saving skimpy skirts and mannish tops of the war years, women revelled in Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look. Full, flaring skirts, hemlines at the calf, softly draped bodices and rounded shoulderlines reached every small town. Men too wore a fuller cut of suit with double-breasted jackets.

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