Fads

During the sexually liberated '70s, when the rule of thumb was "if it feels good do it", gay sexuality seemed a lot less taboo....

In the late 60s and early 70s, the Black Light brought a new dimension to our world. White T-shirts and teeth suddenly would glow in...

Hollywood saw major dollar signs, so a machine was quickly invented which churned out movies showcasing the style, rhythm and badness which Whitey could...

The white anklets known as bobby sox (socks) rocked the conservative world when teenagers began wearing the socks with saddle shoes as a form...

A boombox (or Ghetto Blaster) - basically a large but portable cassette player with two or more loudspeakers - was first developed by Philips...

When young actors like Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Matthew Broderick and Rob Lowe moved out of obscurity and into films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's...

A major component of the budding hip-hop culture of the early 80s, break dancing was a physically demanding youth-oriented dance activity involving complex, improvisational...

The mid-90s was a golden era for British music, with several fine bands all coming good at the same time. There was, though, little camaraderie...

My other car is a . . . I brake for . . . Love is . . . Honk If You Love...

Billy Butlin spotted two things in the 1930s . . . First, that holidaymakers were routinely turfed out of their boarding houses and not allowed...

From his first appearance in the surfing newspaper Tracks, in 1973, Captain Goodvibes was a major hit with young Australian readers. The "pig of steel"...

By 1965, London had become the fashion capital of the world as far as young people were concerned. At its centre were three streets...

Citizens Band Radio had been around for years, but few people knew about them. 23 channels of two-way communication, frequented by curious techno-geeks, lost...

"This chain letter was started in 1972 by a man in Campbell, Missouri, who was completely broke. In less than one year he became...

Chu-Bops were packs of record-shaped pink bubblegum that came housed in a small 3" X 3" replica album cover. The Amural Products Company of Naperville,...

Newsweek magazine declared the year 1969 the "Year of the Commune". A commune could be characterised as a large group of people (usually unrelated)...

Cool Britannia (a play on the title of the popular British patriotic song Rule, Britannia) was a period of increased pride in the culture of...

First published in 1886, Cosmopolitan was known as bland and boring with a slipping circulation. And then Helen Gurley Brown (author of the 1962...

Originally made by the American Aerosol Company in 1965, the "fun foam soap" delighted kids with pop culture character designs such as Popeye, Spider-Man...

Crop circles - a phenomenon which began in the 1970s - were areas in fields where crops (usually cereal crops such as wheat and...