A Time of Transition.

The 1960s were a time of transition in every aspect of American life, and the world of taste and fashion was no exception. To move from conservative Jacqueline Kennedy dress suits, large American-made cars with tail fins and gargantuan engines, built-to-last American modern sofas, and pure-form glass-box buildings to thigh-high miniskirts and dirty blue jeans, small foreign cars, pink disposable plastic chairs, and gaudy Las Vegas-inspired building facades in a matter of one short decade is a phenomenon that only a society charged with a sense of restlessness and turmoil could experience. Those volatile changes in taste and fashion, of course, mirrored what was happening in society as a whole.

Materialism.

The result of America's victory in World War II was an unprecedented confidence in being superior to the people of every other nation in the world. The postwar years in the United States were...