Of all the art and design themes, styles and classifications, postmodernism – the period we are arguably still living in now – is perhaps the most difficult to define. I say arguably still living in, because even that is a matter of opinion. So, what is postmodernism? Rather tricky to define!
Postmodernism concerns everything from aesthetics to social attitudes and language, but is of course, in its simplest terms, a style. But in order to identify and define Postmodernism, we need to set a context within which to place it. For anyone born after the 1980s, much of the true meaning and function of a style, over and above its immediate aesthetic value can be difficult to grasp, but without this understanding, postmodernism cannot really be understood.
Back at the dawn of the 1980s, ‘New Romantic’ style arrived. Men openly wore outrageous makeup in public, style was androgynous and cold – a reflection of the harsh futuristic presence of synthesizers in music, a sound entirely driven by technology. And, as was often the case, people enjoyed challenging the attitudes of their elders by pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable.
This ‘New Romantic’ fashion was partly a reaction to the earlier punk movement in during late 1970s. Again, this was much more than a style of music. A generation of young people, born in a post war society were rebelling against a social order built by their parents and grandparents’ generation. Jamie Reid spearheaded a DIY design ethic using lettering cut from newspapers & Women’s liberation was becoming more powerful, the church’s influence was fading and a sense of real change was in the air. Strange as it may seem now, many older people were genuinely concerned about the possible collapse of society.
Travelling further back, we can identify many more style and art movements; 60s hippies and flower power, 50s rock n roll, back to the Bauhaus & the birth of modernism, Art Nouveau and Art Deco to the Arts & Crafts movement. Looking further still, we see the Victorian era, Elizabethan period, and so on, each with their recognisable styles. None of these styles and movements came into being for its own sake; each was a reaction to the style that preceded it, fuelled by social, technological, political, financial factors of its time.
So, where do those Punks and New Romantics sit today, in our postmodern world? They are a style – merely a look or a sound – and nothing more. The enormous and varied circumstances surrounding their birth are long forgotten, leaving a neatly labelled style as a commodity to be used and discarded on a whim. And this is a hallmark of postmodernism: no more styles arrive, they’ve all been done. Micro-trends, and distortions of earlier styles quickly come and go, affecting only a few, and there is little or no reflection of a cultural or political situation, nor a reaction to any preceding one.
And in this mish-mash of style, a ‘punk’ may walk side by side with a ‘hippy’ friend, yet neither share anything but their visual appearance with those styles; indeed, they may not even be aware of the circumstance surrounding their origins. When Watching a television programme about fashion, interior designers, musicians or architects, we are likely hear statements along the lines of ‘this new skirt design is very 50s’ or ‘the music has a real disco feel’. It’s inescapable – we continually refer to the past when defining style.
Postmodernism could then, be thought of as a restless magpie, stealing gems from history, stripping away their context and distorting their meaning, before carelessly discarding them. It’s far more complex than that of course – there isn’t even a consensus regarding which decade postmodernism began in – but these have been my thoughts. Finally, if you’re looking for more information about postmodernism, I highly recommend ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-90′ by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt; an interesting collection of essays on the subject.