Let’s Bring Back: Styling of the Mad Men Era

Eliza Coleman — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:40:00 +0000

In advance of Mad Men’s return on Sunday, Huffington Post writer Lesley Blume has an excellent column today on what she wishes would be brought back from the Mad Men Era, including: supper clubs with tiny lamps and animal print walls (agree! so chic! so glam!), coifs (such a better word than “up-dos”– I think I could get into something called a “coif”), hats for women, and hats for men.

Here, an excerpt from the article. I was just going to summarize and share a link to it, but it’s so well-written I just had to post part of it here.

“Time-wise, the Mad Men era is so close to our own, and yet so far away culturally. Elaborate social ritual is of paramount importance in the Mad Men realm; details are to be fussed over, not shunted aside in favor of soulless efficiency. The Mad Men world makes a fetish of ornamentation and deifies mysterious artifice; our culture, on the other hand, prizes an almost apathetic informality and rewards the tackiest forms of extroversion.

I once saw Mad Men brilliantly described as an exercise in “loathing nostalgia;” indeed, the epoch’s glamor co-mingles uneasily with many of its deplorable practices and attitudes. The sexism, the homophobia, the racism: those things can stay done and dusted.

Yet there are other things from that decade that are acutely missed, perhaps especially by style-minded people who didn’t get to experience them the first time around. For those of us who grew up in the subsequent era of Gap-sponsored khaki casualness and fast food, the Mad Men world represents a glamor lacking in our lives today.”

You can find the rest of the effects she wishes would be brought back here, including horn-rimmed glasses for men, foxy flight attendant uniforms, and three martini lunches. So worth checking out– the captions for the images are as articulate as the above excerpt and very entertaining.

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Let’s Bring Back: Styling of the Mad Men Era