Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire
For one of millions of examples--elegance as seen in films like Cry Danger?
It is sad that Magnin's is gone, hard to believe that all that could have been destroyed. But would someone who shopped at Magnin's have shopped at Target if Target had existed then? I doubt it. There are still plenty of incredibly lavish and beautifully designed places to shop if you have the $$, in NY and LA at least. As for the "star system"--didn't it actually die in the '50s? If Americans were once dumb enough to depend upon movies to give them a real idea of "elegance"--something very subjective, what's tacky to one man being elegant to another--they still are. There may be more special effects now, but movies then were as phony in their depiction of real life, of the rich or otherwise, as they are now, and there are still plenty of "real estate porn" movies being made. The U.S. is nothing if not aspirational and materialistic. It's a deep hunger. And honestly, I couldn't disagree with you more about their being no style in interior or automotive design. Style just isn't--and never was--in Wichita. |
Though I didn't specifically mention a year or decade in which the star system died, it is generally recognized to have continued into the 1960s and was officially dead in the 1970s. And most certainly many of the films of the 1920s through the 1960s depicted social circumstances that simply were fantasies, even "B" movies. Fantasies that drove people to seek greater than they had with the hope of reaching that fantasy. Since the inception of this country the aspirations of emulating the status of old European Royalty has been in the back of the minds of many. And yes I castigated designers of just about everything since the 1970s of basically having no imagination or desire to pursue elegance. There is no elegance or imagination expressed in a slab sided steel skeletal buildings skinned with mirrored glass. There is no elegance of design in automobiles when today's vehicles all look far more alike than the industry was accused of producing in the 1960s and are functionally far less useful. There is no elegance and little imagination expressed in the cookie cutter houses we see everywhere. Today's neighborhoods look Levitown gone wild because the most of them are developed by and homes built by the same four or five corporations with multiple trade names. Isn't it exciting that one can look at a new home in Orange County and then buy the same or nearly identical home in Atlanta or the suburbs of Miami from a division of the same corporation.