Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781526108821)

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.

Author: Ben Highmore
ISBN-10: 1526108828
ISBN-13: 9781526108821
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/21/2023
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.75lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.70w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2024