Millenials

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”  -Lewis Mumford

This popped up on a page I was reading today.

For those of you who have forgotten or never knew who Jayne Mansfield was, she was a bleach blonde who had a career from the mid 1950s to about 1959 or so. The market for large-breasted suicide blondes crashed around that time. She kept her career going in diminished circumstances until 1967 when she died in a car accident.

The funny thing about Mansfield is how many clones she had in the first decade of the 21st century. The Mansfield formula—platinum sunshine #51 hair combined with push-up bras and very low-cut tops and the inevitable wardrobe "malfunctions" they produced—was very much the norm until very recently.

In other news, Tom Hayden has died. If Jayne Mansfield is the emblem of the most shallow elements of our culture running from the early fifties to the mid sixties, Hayden and his ex-wife Jane Fonda perfectly represent the most shallow elements of the period from 1967 to 1979.

Oddly enough, this gives me a sense of hope.