'Lifestyle revolution is a brilliant corrective to our lazy habit of condescending to the recent past by reducing it to the eccentric, the uncool and the kitsch. Through his richly evocative readings of chicken bricks, quiches, self-assembly furniture, duvets and dinghies, Ben Highmore tells the unwritten story of our collective life. Blending the personal and the political with great skill, this book is a joy to read.'
Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University and author of Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV
'If you ever wondered how a taste for wooden floors, duvets and flat-pack furniture became widespread in British homes, this book is for you. Ben Highmore's focus on the feelings embedded in changing tastes allows him to investigate the meanings of material culture in the making of new middle-class identities. He brings to life a world of controlled casualness and spontaneous sociability - often around a stripped pine kitchen table - that will be familiar to many readers.'
Deborah Sugg Ryan, Professor of Design History and Theory at the University of Portsmouth and author of Ideal Homes: Uncovering the History and Design of the Interwar House
'An engrossing social and cultural history of the rise of consumerism, and a persuasive account of how it changed us.'
Alwyn Turner, author of A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
Introduction
1 Taste and tastemakers
2 Instant good taste: the Habitat story
3 The good life
4 Colour supplement living
5 Welcome to the village
6 Through the plateglass window
7 Status striving and other myths we live by
8 But isn't that a class thing?
9 From the West Indian front room to Root
10 Adrian Mole, the future of taste, and me...
Index