All Photos By Gail
One of the most joyful surprises awaiting visitors to the New York Botanical Garden’s Flower Power exhibition isn’t growing in the gardens — it’s parked right up front. Covered from bumper to bumper in vibrant flowers, psychedelic lettering, and saturated rainbow colors, artist Snoeman’s painted bus immediately transports visitors back to the optimistic spirit of the late 1960s — specifically 1967’s Summer of Love.
Photos By Gail
Among the many fashion trends born during the Swinging Sixties, few captured the era’s spirit of experimentation quite like the Nehru jacket. Distinguished by its streamlined shape, stand-up mandarin collar, and lack of traditional lapels, the style represented a dramatic break from conventional Western tailoring. Named after Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whose achkan knee-length long coats inspired the look, the jacket became an unlikely symbol of the counterculture and flower power movements, blending Eastern influences with the decade’s appetite for bold colors and new ideas.
Continue reading Eye On Design: The Nehru Jacket and the Psychedelic Spirit of the 1960s
Photos By Gail
This week we are having a serious Design Flashback as we feature the truly iconic Blow inflatable hair. way back in 1967, long before TikTok and IKEA hacks took over our interiors, the Blow Chair literally burst onto the scene. Designed by Italian architects Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino, and Paolo Lomazzi, this cheeky piece of pop design was the world’s first mass-produced inflatable chair, and it had zero interest in blending in. Continue reading Eye On Design: The Blow Inflatable Armchair
Photos By Gail
Despite having grown up in the ’60s and ’70s, I never met anyone whose parents were hip and cool enough to have decorated their Family or TV Room with as many iconic pieces of furniture as you see in the above photo (and forget about the hallucinatory-print wall paper, which is just insane). It might surprised you to know that these retro-futurist styles are still in-demand today. Let’s check them out.
Continue reading Eye On Design: 1960s TV Room
When a song instantly conjures a mental movie, on whose soundtrack it fits perfectly, from the very first time you can hear it, that song possesses a cinematic quality that’s been missing from music since the seventies. Just being serious. The transcendent power of the one-song soundtrack hit me as soon as I watched this week’s video clip, “How You Feel” from the southern California-based, mixed-gender sextet, WARGIRL. Blending sixties psychedelia together with seventies funk until it is oh, so smooth, “How You Feel” could have been lifted from a key scene in almost any early James Bond thriller, or perhaps something a bit more exotic, such as Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. If reading that sentence doesn’t get you excited to hear this band, you are dead from the neck up and there is no hope for you. Visually, the accompanying video is a Mondrian-esque, color-block title sequence to that very same movie in your head. It’s two minutes and thirty-five seconds of pure, cinematic perfection.
Continue reading Video Clip of The Week: WARGIRL, “How You Feel”
