pop tops
Formica Forever Published by Formica Corporation With Metropolis Books
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Metropolis Books Metropolisbooks.com
26
JUNE/JULY 2014
hile the intelligentsia condemned plastics for imitating everything from marble to lacquer, for replacing the old “authentic” materials with new factory-fresh surfaces, an overwhelming majority of Americans took them into their hearts and their homes. The kitchen table, clad with Formica laminate, for instance, is a shared memory for baby-boomer Americans right across all income levels. Andy Warhol famously said, “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke. …” The Formica-laminate topped
table has that same democratic universality. The 1950s urge to clad as many surfaces as possible in Formica was only partly driven by the company’s marketing. Any reading of the postwar zeitgeist — popular DIY magazines, for instance — suggests that consumers were thinking up new ways to replace every old surface with something new that signaled modernity. Smooth, bright, shiny surfaces that wiped clean became a global obsession. By applying them almost everywhere, postwar homeowners — born in the 1920s and 1930s — could wipe out the horrors of the recent past and mark their participation in the modern mainstream — they could “Live the Dream.” From Formica Forever, published by the Formica Corporation with Metropolis Books, metropolisbooks.com. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.