Ben Highmore 
Lifestyle revolution 
How taste changed class in late 20th-century Britain

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.

İçerik tablosu

Introduction
1 Taste and tastemakers
2 Instant good taste: the Habitat story
3 The good life
4 Colour supplement living
5 Welcome to the village
6 Through the plateglass window
7 Status striving and other myths we live by
8 But isn’t that a class thing?
9 From the West Indian front room to Root
10 Adrian Mole, the future of taste, and me…
Index

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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).