Time for a shot of 1970’s Sass into 2022

The 1970’s are portrayed as the decade that taste forgot, remembered for a quadrupling of the energy price, rampant inflation, endless strikes and declining stock markets.  Sounds familiar?

There are analogies with the 1970’s as today we face an energy crisis sparked by a war, inflation outpacing wages, rising interest rates and global stock markets officially in a bear market grip, and to top it all the threat of the largest rail strike in 40 years.   

But not all was bad in the 1970’s – fashion echoed a time of bold social innovation as well as strong female empowerment.  Think of Gloria Steinem in her Aviators and who can forget Bianca Jagger’s Yves St Laurent trouser suit.  

From a technological perspective, the 1970’s also saw the invention of the floppy disk by IBM in 1971 enabling the Personal Computing revolution with the launch of  Apple II PC in 1977; the advent of mobile communication with the first Motorola cell phone in 1973; a retail revolution with the introduction of bar codes in 1974; and a major health care breakthrough with the first MRI Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan in 1977 ^(1). 

Times of adversity (and war) are times of great pain and social upheaval but these times of crisis have usually led to change, to both social progress and technological innovation as we have seen throughout the 20C.  

Bring on some 1970’s Sass into 2022…  

(1)  https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/293356  10 Things You Didn’t Realize Were Invented in the 1970’s