The Suburban Dream: Style and the Home Christian Dior: The New Look In 1947 Christian Dior presented a fashion look with a fitted jacket with a nipped in waist and full calf length skirt.  It was a dramatic change from wartime austerity styles.  Read More Fashion, Film Noir and Romance Unlike other forms of cinema, the film noir has no paraphernalia that it can truly call its own. Unlike the western, with cattle drives, lonely towns on the prairie, homesteading farmers, Winchester rifles, and Colt 45s. Read More Evolution of Fashion Styles Fashion is how we express our identitites. Fashion not only highlights the social history and the needs of women, but also the overall cultural aesthetic of the various periods. The evolution of fashion dates back to several hundred years and as our attitude and culture change, fashion comes along with it. Read More The Reappearance of Youth Fashions Even as the established couture houses tightened their hold, a new spirit was abroad, and their dominance came under attack. The New Look had been a sensational and ostentatious fashion, and fashion continued to be associated with an international aristocracy of birth and talent, but the 1920s' ideal of understated chic had never entirely vanished. Read More Design for the Nuclear Family The prime difficulty in most city planning until the 20th century was due to the fact that too few trained individuals had given specific thought to such problems as the regulation of traffic, control of the ingress of food stuffs, and the elimination of waste material.  Read More The Promotion of Lifestyle With the Arcadian and Utopian idea continually before him, the average American considers the ideal living conditions to be such as will allow him a maximum of space in an individual home, preferably in the suburbs. Beginning with the town of Pullman, founded in 1880 at Gary, Indiana, there rose in America several privately planned suburban real-estate developments. Read More 1950s Cars: Dream Machines With the return of prosperity in the early 1920's, the American automobile industry came into its own as the nation's largest manufacturing enterprise. Production of motor vehicles climbed from 2,227,349 in 1920 to a phenomenal high of 5,337,687 in 1929, a figure not surpassed for another 20 years.  Read More Fashion Illustration From the 1940s, photography came completely to dominate the fashion magazine although illustration was still common into the 1960s. Initially prized for its "truthfulness", it is often less informative than line drawing, and can be just as mannered. Irving Penn in the United States, and Anthony Annstrong-Jones in Britain moved fashion photography towards a new informality and movement in the 1950s.  Read More Beatniks Generation in San Francisco In the United States the Beats, or Beatniks, were originaIly a West Coast phenomenon. The word 'beat' was primarily in use after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted. Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow combined it with other words like 'dead beat'or 'beat-up' in his book Really The Blues. Read More Advertising for Men While, in the interwar years, most consumer goods had been aimed at a female market (even if it didn't earn the money to pay for them), by the 1950s men had become, increasingly, the target for the ad-men of Madison Avenue. A wide range of supremely "masculine" goods - from cars to eleetric shavers to cigarettes showed that the male species was as susceptible... Read More Japanese Design in the 1950s The question of Zen's origin and its relationship to Buddhism has been taken up by many authorities and given different answers, depending upon the author's background and point of view. Yet everyone agrees that Zen--to use Alan Watts's expression--has a peculiar flavor and is unlike anything found in India.  Read More