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Styles and Movements

Populuxe

Postwar and Late Modern Architecture

Populuxe was a consumer culture and design aesthetic that flourished in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, its name blending popular and luxury to describe how everyday mass-produced goods and buildings were styled to suggest affluence. It favored pastel-colored plastics in curved and angular forms, metallic finishes that mimicked chrome, and materials such as stucco, sheet metal and stainless steel arranged in geometric shapes to create a futuristic look. The aesthetic emerged as consumers came to see mass-produced semi-luxury goods as genuine luxury, building on early twentieth-century Fordist production and reinforced by the growing influence of celebrity culture on consumer taste, and it overlapped closely with mid-century modern architecture, Streamline Moderne and Googie architecture as related expressions of an optimistic, technology-minded, futurist sensibility. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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Populuxe (Wikipedia)
In Group: Postwar and Late Modern Styles of North America, Lead paragraph
Quote, In Group: Postwar and Late Modern Styles of North America, Lead paragraph
Populuxe was a consumer culture and aesthetic in the United States popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
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