Mad Men Style: The Best of the Sixties

A lot of people can't wait for Mad Men next Sunday because they think Jon Hamm is hot. Others just want to see January Jones do her Breck Girl thing again. Poor confused Sal -- will he or won't he? -- that will keep a lot of us going.

And everyone in the beleaguered advertising industry is dying for another whiff of what life could have been like, if they'd been born thirty years earlier. Not me. I can't wait for Man Men to resume because I want to see all those midcentury modern sets -- it's my own weird Selectric dream come to life.

To get me through the final countdown, I've been looking through old issues of House Beautiful and found some real Mad Men style from the sixties. Unfortunately, not in High Def.

Comments

[PhilipB]

03:48 PM on 08/13/2009

My family had kept every issue of House Beautiful up to the 1970's and i loved looking at your slideshow from the early 1960's. I remember the HB issue 'How to be Shibui with American Things" and many others. What is interesting is that there are design lessons which can be applied today; rooms where not all is contemporary, but period antiques incorporated and used in a "modern" way. There was an "East meets West "aesthetic, and I am reminded of the Mad Men president who has the Japanese office. To incorporate Asian things was to be at the height of sophistication in the early 60's. Today Chinese antiques have taken a big hit on the market, after a flood of inexpensive goods and fakes in the antiquities area. Coromandel screens, once de riguer placed behind a sofa have fallen to changing tastes. it is interesting to see in Mad Men what was in style in design, went out of fashion and is back and relevant today.

[mombabytiger]

06:24 PM on 08/12/2009

You're right! The set decoration, costumes and props are just as fascinating as the show! And how lucky you are to be friends with Ina! I would give anything to be a guest at one of her little dinners - she is my goddess!

[JScott]

11:21 AM on 08/12/2009

Eichler Homes, Eames, Barcelona chairs, Bertoia, George Nelson Clocks---cool stuff

Nuff of this faux french chateau, tuscan McMansion, MARBLE COLUMNS (cue SNL sketch) crap

There's one scene in the series where he's buying a Cadillac (classic 61 convertible) cool showroom,
wonder if it was filmed at Casa de Cadillac in Sherman Oaks (building still stands pretty much unchanged) google street view it.

[pcola]

06:21 PM on 08/10/2009

"You have to look out for that in modern decoration. Beyond a certain point you swing right around back into Grandma's house again." -- Robert Benchley, "Imagination in the Bathroom," 1932

[Nancy Pierce]

02:50 PM on 08/10/2009

I see my parents' house, the Brady house, and the set of "Bob Newhart" in these! I can't wait for Mad Men to start this weekend!

[cktirumalai]

09:58 AM on 08/10/2009

I turned 23 in 1960, not young enough to be at my most impressionable. What I absorbed from the period was not its manners or mores or ways but the intellectual and emotional search for something new and different, something tougher than the potency of Weed or Flower Power.