In graphic design at the moment, it’s the 1960s. That smart, brash, "modern" look. Clean-edged, a bit in-your-face, a strong emphasis on bold typography. It’s Schipol airport signage circa 1967. This goes through into exhibition design: one I curated for the British Council on Millennium projects, called "12 for 2000" currently out there in the world somewhere, was designed by Studio Myerscough as a spacy sequence of lightbox clusters with big, big images and text like signs. We knew it had a 1960s feel to it: we did it knowingly. I would have been 10 years old when that style first came round. Morag Myerscough, bless her, was probably busy being conceived on a love-in somewhere. Subsequently I’ve come across artists working in the same light-box medium. The general mood is summed up by the CD artwork for that dreamy pop group St. Etienne: their 1998 offering "Good Humour" could have come directly from the Summer of Love itself.
But fashion nostalgia has a harder edge, too. Think Get Carter. Think the Ipcress File. Why else has Michael Caine, after a run of very so-so Hollywood movies, become a hero to a younger generation and moved back to Britain? The design and architecture associated with those films and that era are, unsurprisingly, in vogue. I treasure the scene in "Get Carter" in the scenic restaurant built improbably on top of Gateshead’s Brutalist multi-storey car park (by architect Owen Luder, I believe). The campy designers are explaining their fit-out concept to their client when Carter arrives to sort him out and flings him unceremoniously from the roof. The designers look at each other and one says to the other something like, "Bang go the fees on this job." Well, the Gateshead restaurant never got its fit-out in real life either – it has remained empty to this day – but never mind. We got Oliver Peyton’s Mash chain instead, which I like to think of as a homage to what might have been.
Fashions? What about weird men’s lavatories, then? The mirror-like urinals in the London Mash are famously curved to make men’s willies look bigger. It just doesn’t bear thinking about what the womens’ lavs are like. And just while everyone was chortling over that, Philip Watts Design was installing television screens in the urinals of Birmingham’s Shimla Pinks Restaurant, a trendy Indian eaterie. Yes, IN them. So you get to pee over the TV. The 1990s, then, are also the decade where designers took over the last design-free zone left anywhere – the lavs. Some restaurateurs, like Sir Terence Conran, would have no truck with this and kept his loos boringly orthodox. I’m with Terence on this one.
If there weren’t fashions in design and architecture, however, we’d never be able to date anything. This is why the work of genuine innovators, in retrospect, can seem impossibly advanced. Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) anticipated the Bauhaus particularly in his silverware and may be regarded as a proto-functionalist. More usual, though, was the work of architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and C.F.A Voysey around the turn of the century, who looked both forward and back. Later modernists claimed them, but Voysey certainly hated the work of the post-1918 modernists while Mackintosh, left stranded by the machine age, drifted out of architecture into painting.
What is certain is that three great architects of the same generation – Mackintosh, Sir Edwin Lutyens and, in the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright – were all aware of each others’ work through the publications of the day. They all knew what was going on in Vienna and Paris and London and Chicago. Wright drew heavily on European influences for his early work. Lutyens was assiduous about getting his work published. Mackintosh was a hero in Germany and Austria, if not in England. No alert architect could fail to pick up on the latest trends in this way, then as now. The result is that, in most cases, it is easy to date a building, a piece of furniture, an item of clothing. Things would be distinctly rum if this were not the case.
