Populuxe

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.