70s Style & Design: My saviour from the flaccid Jim Callaghan

It may be a crippling lack, but I have no nostalgia. To me the present is always superior to the past: hello Lady Gaga, bye-bye Madge. Friends of another era are best left there; their yearnings for time machine recollections fall on deaf ears. To me, Facebook is a 21st Century nightmare of zombied exes (I jest, natch...).

However, periodic attempts are made to fill me with a longing for dead things, and the latest is the delicious-looking, lavishly illustrated 70s Style & Design by Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop, published last year.

I blame Jim Callaghan for my antipathy to the 70s. Quite why the predatory Tom Driberg once grabbed Jim's flaccid penis is beyond my understanding. Just to look at old news footage of that misshapen blob of pinstripe outside Number 10 (face perma-shiny; thin Brylcreemed hair combed redundantly) cramps out happier memories of the 70s, such as the suffocation of Adam Ant scene in Jubilee (1977) - Britain's finest ever movie.

© Jane England 

Yet 70s Style & Design is a flood of memory jolts of why I might want to flit back to that decade. On a return ticket, mind.

Identifying four key themes of the 70s - Pop to Postmodernism, Belle Epoque, Supernature and Avant-garde - Lutyens and Hislop cover fashion, interiors, art and architecture. Everything is an influence or an influenced, ever in (r)evolutionary transit. Punk - unhygienically black in tooth and claw - distantly journied from France's 19th-century Decadent movement via Dadaism and a 100,000 Warhol trash-lover art students. Meantime, a lot of what originated in the 70s didn't take off until later, such as the Debbie Harry/Fiorucci look, an 80s smash 'n' grab.

Past-plunderer and Biba-creator Barbara Hulanicki is rightly identified as a key revivalist of 70s retro camp, rooted in the Naughty Nineties and 20s/30s Art Deco, culminating for me in Joan Collins' The Bitch and its many mirrored walls and ceilings. And its glossy, glorious crappiness. (Fans of Hulanicki may enjoy this, from my meeting with her last year with permanent fiancee Molly Parkin)

Eco warriors under the age of 30, who imagine life began on their day of birth, will be shocked to learn that 70s stalwarts such as Habitat and Laura Ashley were inspired by the back-to-nature movement of that time. The Supernature section, more than any other, will drag you jarringly back to the present in pessimistic déjà vu.

Reviewing the book late last year in the Spectator, Bevis Hillier gossiped that Lutyens ('a great-great-nephew of the architect') had told him that 'he and Hislop hoped their book would give the lie to the cliché reputation of the Seventies as "the decade that taste forgot"'. Hillier concluded: 'I’m sorry, but the book wonderfully, triumphantly confirms the cliché. It is a Kitschfest of the highest order.'

Who would argue with Bevis?

To buy a copy of 70s Style & Design click here

Dominic Lutyens' blog. Dominic is working on the text for a book on Celia Birtwell which will be published by Quadrille in autumn 2011.