Generally, I’m quiet fond of most 1970s design, even the stuff that looks especially dated and hilarious to us now. Maybe especially that stuff. But there is a subset of 1970s design that always kind of creeps me out. I think most of what I like about ’70s graphic design is that it can (not always, but the potential is there) become a sort of zanier take on Bauhaus/Modernist design, with earthtone stripes and clean typography and a certain strange futurist feeling. But every now and then, designers in the ’70s would give in to these weird urges to make things absurdly fussy and ornate, and look to this weird idealized Victorian era for inspiration. And the combination of those things just ends up, well, weird. And a little creepy.
This 1971 brochure for the Winnebago Chieftain is a great example of what I mean; Winnebago design from the 1970s was usually felt more like that ’70s futurist sort of feeling, but this brochure leans hard into that other weird ’70s influence, that strangely saccharine and somehow unsettling Victorian influence that just makes me think of strange lonely old houses and creepy porcelain dolls that rotate their heads slowly to look at you, clearly possessed, and a certain sort of musty, heavy, overly sweet lingering smell.
It weirds me out. I mean, just look at this stuff:
What a I supposed to do with these images? Does this make me want an RV? I mean, only in the context that it could help me get away from whatever this is. That picture of the bed in the upper left feels like a photo the cops would take to show where the hostage was held for all of those months. Then there’s Madame Ghosty in the other upper corner, and that bedroom set out in that field with Primrosetta Hathawayfield taking her mourning dove out of its floating, gilded cage just creeps me out. And that carmel-mustard colored shag rug looks longer than the grass it’s flopped on.
Why were we doing this? Why couldn’t ’70s design keep looking boldly forward? Why were we looking back so hard, just with more orange and burnt umber, inscribing fussy lines on cheap particleboard cabinet veneer, faking marble on the walls and getting way too into making tea?
And that typography up top. Ugh. I have this thing against really fussy script typography, it feels cloying and pretentious and is kind of a visual mess. I especially feel this way when script fonts are used for all-caps text, like this:
Ugh, awful! It’s almost illegible, too. Loopy script types like this can have their place, but they were never meant to be all-caps and used for strings of letters and numbers like this. Who likes this?
Oof, look at this incredible display of textures and earthtones! Sometimes I forget that a lot of the ’70s was like being in a world made of guacamole and chili and creamed corn. All the fabrics seemed so thick and textured, that I remember. For years I think I thought plaid was as much a tactile experience as a visual one. All of these fabrics feel like everything I touched in the Lutheran church basement youth rooms that hosted the Boy Scout troops I was in.
And, again, up top, we can’t escape this weird backwards-looking fetish. This time it feels more antebellum South than Victorian, though.
The whole pre-Civil War south thing keeps cropping up, too. In this spread about propane tanks and water level gauges, they really needed to sneak in a bit of the Confederate battle flag?
And then sometime they just went full plantation:
The hell, Winnebago? Why? Why do we need Col.Sanders and his favorite daughter, Herbsann Spices Sanders, promenading in front of this old plantation house to their massive, parked RV? I get that we look at this sort of scene through different eyes today, just seeing a miserable time of oppression, but even back then, why is this a way to sell RVs? I just don’t get the connection here?
Of course, what could be better to show than a bare RV mattress? Give that some stains, chuck it by a ravine in the woods, and stick a tattered stack of Oui and Swank and Hustler magazines and you have a really powerful scene of woodland discovery for so many people of my generation.
Also, please note the shag toilet seat cover and all those patterned, brocaded fabrics that made every seat look like it had a skin condition.
I like how the fabric patterns are shown in this cutaway, because it makes those chairs look like weird aliens. Especially that one near the back, above the couch.
These cutaways are pretty fantastic, though:
I can’t stay mad at a brochure with such fantastic cutaways! There’s even one free of the absurd ornate frames! Look!
Now that’s a satisfying diagram! These things were so huge, and with their corrugated sides, really built like drivable sheds. I also love their profile/silhouette, which wasn’t just non-aerodynamic, it had a genuine, undisguised contempt for the wind, shoving it aside with real malice as it lumbered down the highway, chugging a gallon of gas every other mile.
Man, the ’70s were weird.
Top graphic and story images: Winnebago
That first photo with just the top bunk is giving me Heaven’s Gate vibes.
“.. Col.Sanders and his favorite daughter, Herbsann Spices Sanders..:
This statement (and several of the others) prompted out loud laughing
(i think the kids abbreviate this OLL)
Torch, Keep up it up / never change
“Man, the ’70s were weird.”
You have no idea.
That looks to me like they’re literally parked in front of Mt. Vernon, which doesn’t exactly contradict the point about a plantation, but at least it’s not just a random one but something that could be considered a vacation destination.
https://boonehallplantation.com/
My memory hath failed me. Thanks.
This brochure was published a little while before the Yom Kippur War and ensuing oil embargo, but even so the bloom of America’s equivalent of les trente glorieuses was starting to wilt for the vast numbers of middle-income whites who’d benefited greatly from the postwar boom. Inflation was rising (Nixon imposed wage and price controls and ended Bretton Woods in 1971), the country was pretty much universally sick of the Vietnam War (even if the police and the hard hats were happy to beat the crap out of anybody who protested it), crime rates were increasing, and while the ghettos weren’t burning to the extent they had been in the mid-to-late ’60s, the people in them were still vocal about securing their rights and pesky liberal judges often agreed. The air was filthy and the rivers were on fire. The present was looking a bit rough and the future looked worse no matter where you were on the political spectrum – tax bracket creep and higher crime rates were enough to shift the antsy center-right off-center into already bubbling white backlash, while a good chunk of the left was giving up on the cities and going back to the land (the 1980 census was the last one to show rural population gains.)
So as others have mentioned, the aesthetic zeitgeist started looking back. The impending Bicentennial was already making Early American styles popular in the ’60s (watch the evolution of the furniture in Samantha Stephens’s living room over the years), and while these days ’60s luxury is imagined as Eames and Saarinen, overstuffed French Provincial was a lot more common. The dandyism of psychedelia and Yippies and Hammer gothic chic was diffused into a receptive broader culture. The overwrought cursive script used in the brochure was perfect for the suburbs, as was the filigree stitching in the backrest of the vinyl front seat of my parents’ ’74 Cutlass Supreme Cruiser, but city types were soon deploying revived ’20s-style lettering everywhere from sitcom credits to the sign in front of Studio 54 as they were appreciating the florid details they found in old buildings as they extended and expanded the urban gentrification that kicked off in Islington and the Upper West Side. And, to the vast and Silent Majority of the potential buying pool, visual callbacks to the plantation era signified elegance and luxury instead of the genocidal horror show of actual plantations.
Whew that was alot; you could have just said this was Get America Mammoth Again before the current push for same
(think like minded folks use the acronym GAMA on red hats)
The 70s were the era of Laura Ashley and “Prairie Skirts” so there was a strain of 19th century nostalgia alongside Disco, and High Tech. Some of that actually traces back to 60s hippie style too. The brocade upholstery and shag carpet reflect both a Malaise Era cars and a mid 70s house. Personally I was spared most of that since my parents favored modernist furniture and European cars but I had some unfortunate trousers in my past.
“I had some unfortunate trousers in my past.”
I think we all did, those of us who were around then…
“Unfortunate Trousers” sounds like a good silly band name.
Ah yes, 70s fashion statements. Houndstooth bell bottoms spring to mind.
Gunne Sax as well as Laura Ashley. Many of the styles I saw back in the day would look pretty ridiculous today.
Oh the corduroy we endured, and red denim!
So much shag carpeting!
And yes, these ads do seem to lean hard into the faux Victorian/Stepford Wives aesthetic. Which is pretty darn creepy.
It’s always a little startling to realize just how massive the rear overhang of such Winnebagos like the one in the picture with Col.Sanders and his favorite daughter, Herbsann Spices Sanders, could be…
Yeah, it was actually not at all uncommon around here in hilly East Tennessee in the 70s & 80s (and, yes, still very occasionally today!!) to see such Winnebagos get stuck in spots like the transition from the street to an uphill driveway or an up-sloping entry to a gas station where the rear overhang would hit the ground while the driver still had a bit of speed and there was enough momentum to propel the Winnebago forward until the rear wheels completely lost contact with the ground. Can’t imagine that it was altogether a straightforward procedure to get those ginormous Winnebagos unstuck…
As often as I saw such situations I somehow never ever caught the process of getting unstuck, go figure.
Torch is absolutely at his best when describing things he doesn’t like. This has made my day.
Herbsann Spices Sanders had me literally lol
That design style gives me a hankering for a sip of moloko plus, and maybe indulging in a bit of ultra violence after I listen to a bit of the old Ludwig Van.
I’m dead. This is perfect, although she does look a bit older than 11.
It’s rumored she has 11 aliases, but investigations have only confirmed “Ms.G” as central to her identity.
They went so hard on the wall to wall carpet back then. The only reason you can find an old house “remodeled” in the 70s with beautiful wood floors under the dank carpet.
Also interesting that brochure is from a dealer in south London, Imagine driving that boat around the Cotswolds? How did it fit down any streets
Don’t forget – “these ceilings are too high, and I don’t like having ornate plaster crown molding and pleasant lighting, let’s fix all that with a low hanging drop ceiling with florescent tube lighting so our living room can feel just like the waiting room of the DMV”
Cocaine. The answer to anything and everything involving the ’70s is cocaine. Giant snowy mountains of the stuff. And leftover LSD from the ’60s.
Agree with the other cultural analyses of the crappiness of the 1970s, but to put it succinctly: rock musician Tommy James (of Tommy James and the Shondells) once said the ’60s was like one big party, and the ’70s was like one big hangover after the party.
What bothers me is not seeing a single image of a fondue pot. That and the thought of a giant waterbed sloshing around back there when going around corners.
Oh Belvedere, come hee-yer boy! (Said a famous cartoon character)
You had to live through it as an adult to understand the era.
Speaking of looking back instead of forward, this era was the start of our entire modern Western cultural regression and stagnation.
Post war, 45′ to 70′, was wildly future focused and optimistic.
Since the 70s we’ve been stuck looking back. The future now looks scary, doomsday scenarios are the norm, the kids don’t think they will survive to 2040.
And culture has fully stagnated. Music, fashion, art, architecture, industrial design are all stuck. Products from 25 years ago can pass for current. A song for 1998 sounds like 2026, etc.
We are stuck.
You’re not wrong. As a Gen Xer, the 70s felt very different from the 80s, which felt very different from the 90s. The 00s, 10s, and 20s have just kind of blurred together, that I couldn’t really identify anything as being a fad of the “00s” versus the “10s” and now over halfway through the 20s! I see things I think are current, but then find out they came out 10+ years ago! I can’t honestly tell anymore.
As someone who’s ONLY seen the 00’s, 10s and 20s, they felt very much the same to me. Cars and electronics got more powerful, but not really in a way that changes how I live.
I guess I witnessed the rise of social media, which caused a substantial change in how the people around me behaved, but everything after Facebook picked up steam has been roughly the same.
On the world stage, there are unprecedented calamities happening every day, making the future look bleaker every year, but in my lived experience, I can only attribute any changes in my direct environment to the regular progression of myself growing up and moving through the steps of life, I reckon everyone born after the “iPad baby” phenomenon has experienced roughly the same world.
The internet has created so much homogenized culture that everything is like it is now.
When kids in different areas of the country find out about the same fads at the same time instantly, everything seems the same.
And fads get recycled so frequently, kids are walking around right now literally dressed exactly the same as I did when I was in high school 25 years ago, its kind of weird, actually
Baudrillard wasn’t kidding with that simulacrum stuff, and he died in ‘07, just missing the premier of the first MCU movie in ‘08. Since then it’s been pretty much sequels all the way down.
Did anyone in the 70s make an RV with a conversation pit?
I’m also disturbed by the pots and pans on the *shag carpet* kitchen floor.
And what’s up with that pan with the really long handle? How’s does it keep from tipping over and dump contents on the shag carpet??
That’s for when you want to make ramen or soup, but are too lazy to get out of the bed.
Carpet in kitchens and bathrooms was, sadly, all too common. What where they thinking?
We had a bathroom with wall-to-wall brown shag carpet when I was a kid. I do not want to know what kind of thinking led to that choice.
That damp carpet and stale cigarette smoke might blend together into a pleasant, welcoming aroma?
For those of us that lived this era as adults – don’t forget the “Mediterranean Period” with the extremely heavy, dark wood and leather furniture, hanging lamps, dark wood paneling and tile floors. God forbid you had to move – just leave it there boys, the next owner can just have it!
There was a somewhat future looking design esthetic then too, but it fell more into the 60’s psychedelia looking stuff.
There was a small subset of Star Treky furniture that was popular in the 70’s too.
My favorite example of this is the restaurant and pub in Cannonball Run. I remember restaurants like that.
Thank you, that is EXACTLY what I’m connecting with that era. Some steak houses looked like that well into the 2010s…
My wife and I make fun of the “mid-century medieval” style that was a thing back then with the dark wood and iron decor.
“mid-century medieval”
Perfect. Now I know how to describe that particular type of ‘70s kitsch instead of a complicated reference like “So there was this post-apocalyptic Charlton Heston movie called ‘The Omega Man’ that had him holed up in an LA apartment full of columns and busts and fake wrought iron stuff…”
Yep. And Disney leaned heavy into this stuff as well, in their parks and movies. Ugh.
My Mom had a single wide trailer that was ‘factory furnished’ with furniture made from dark stained 2x lumber and hideous patterned fabric that was probably rejected by Winnebago as too ugly.
Did the couch cushions have a picture of, like, an old mill with a waterwheel, printed on them?
Yeah, something like that. oranges & browns on beigey velvety background. My Mom hated them but couldn’t afford to replace them. They are probably still in that trailer even after she sold it ages ago.
“The hell, Winnebago? Why?”
Drugs.
There were lots of drugs in the ’70s.
There’s your answer.
I don’t know what it is about the 70’s, but I can appreciate design from every single decade except the 1970s. It just feels so…gross?
You are correct!
“Why were we doing this? Why couldn’t ’70s design keep looking boldly forward? Why were we looking back so hard…”
While everywhere else in the world was moving forward – looking backwards was a uniquely American thing.
Because Bicentennial.
(Also recession, layoffs, gas shortages, feminism, racial justice, gays, Watergate, Archie Bunker….)
Nope, its global. Everyone is looking back, all cultures, we are afraid of the future.
In the 1970s, Europe, Japan and Korea were afraid of the past.
Herbsann Spices Sanders, don’t ever stop Torch.
That’s a good one. Would work as part of the outro to Car Talk. “…Our fried chicken chef is Herbsann Spices…”
She was the seventh child in Col. Sanders’ family.
and our motor home design consultant is Winnie Bagel
I laughed so hard I bounced my cat off my chest. Yes, I am working VERY hard this afternoon…
It’s like 70s designers just gave up. Not all of them. Just most of them.
Or, more likely, the commissioning executives wouldn’t sign off on anything that was actually good.