Waubonsee Community College

The conquest of cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism, Thomas Frank

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-272) and index

illustrationsfacsimilesplates

index present

non fiction

The conquest of cool

bibliography

36994233

Thomas Frank

business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism

While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing new study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined - and even anticipated by - such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business. In both areas, each having also been an important pillar of fifties conservatism, the utopian, complacent surface of postwar consumerism was smashed by a new breed of admen and manufacturers who openly addressed public distrust of their industries, who recognized the absurdity of consumer society, who made war on conformity, and who finally settled on youth rebellion and counterculture as the symbol of choice for their new marketing vision. The Conquest of Cool is a thorough history of advertising as well as an incisive commentary on the evolution of a peculiarly American sensibility, the pervasive co-optation that defines today's hip commercial culture. By studying the devices and institutions of co-optation rather than those of resistance, Frank offers a picture of the 1960s that differs dramatically from the accounts of youth rebellion and sell-out that have become so familiar over the years. The Conquest of Cool forsakes the stories of campus and bohemia to follow the Dodge Rebellion, chronicle the Pepsi Generation, and recount the Peacock Revolution - by so doing, it raises important new questions about the culture of that most celebrated and maligned decade

A cultural perpetual motion machine : management theory and consumer revolution in the 1960s -- Buttoned down : high modernism on Madison Avenue -- Advertising as cultural criticism : Bill Bernbach versus the mass society -- Three rebels : advertising narratives of the sixties -- "How do we break these conformists of their conformity?" : creativity conquers all -- Think young : youth culture and creativity -- The varieties of hip : advertisements of the 1960s -- Carnival and cola : hip versus square in the cola wars -- Fashion and flexibility -- Hip and obsolescence -- Hip as official capitalist style