1940s Pop Culture

American author Hanna Rosin once said “Pop culture is like our subconscious.” This means that as society evolves, culture evolves with it. As certain parts of a society change, what is widely accepted and believed will shift accordingly, so the culture itself is in continuous motion and transition. From the 1940s to the 1980s, many developments in popular culture held an extreme impact on society. Music, clothing, and the development of technology has changed America and pop culture forever. Music has always been a dynamic function - one that depicts the atmosphere, problems, and personality of the time it was written. In the 1940s, jazz and scat singing was widely popular. Jazz got its origin from early African roots, and is said

In the past, the purpose of clothing was solely to accentuate certain aspects of a body or to show wealth and power. The 1940s showed a time of class - men wore suits for their office jobs and women wore long dresses and big hats. During this time, women began to play with more expressive coloring while still remaining modest. Hair was either full of volume or styled very close to the face. In the 1950s, men wore leather jackets and women mostly donned poodle skirts or thin pencil skirts. The 1960s and ‘70s began the mismatched “hippie” era - flower print, tie dye, mini skirts with oversized sweaters, and fringes. Finally, the ‘80s brought looks very familiar to many teenagers today. Many wore jelly shoes, neon clothing, chokers, and high waisted jeans. Many of these clothing styles were popularized from music styles, world messages and crises, and role models in pop culture. Today, fashion comes, goes and repeats a few decades later. In the average teenager’s lifetime, big hair from the ‘40s, leather jackets from the ‘50s, fringes and tassels from the ‘60s, tie dye from the ‘70s, and jelly shoes from the ‘80s have been ever-present. If style had never shifted so drastically, they would have never been so closely followed by today’s younger generations, and the style could have been lost forever. As the years pass, people find inspiration from previous popular styles and merge them into what is popular today to make it their own. Clothing and style is an endless cycle of changing and morphing, but remembering the origin and reasoning behind the styles in the first