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To discuss the 40s and 50s styles in one go seems strange. These are two decades about which so much could be individually written, yet about which there is so much commonality. However, this is just a prelude to further ramblings about the individual decades.

These are fabulous eras for fashion, music and popular culture as a whole and there is so much more to be said than appears in this brief article.

The two decades evoke different imagery in terms of popular culture but they have one thing in common in that they both evoke imagery about the same topics: Music, cars and fashion. These three seem to pervade in nostalgia about both decades and they set the trend for latter decades too.

It seems daft to think that music, cars and fashion alone should be an enduring image from the 40s when that decade was so dominated by the war and I am sure that, for those who lived through the war years, the memories are so different.

Yet, as far as popular culture is concerned, cars, music and fashion are in the forefront when looking at the 40s and 50s and it seems so frivolous given the 5 years of war in the 40s. The reasons for this, perhaps, lie in the differences in life in 40s Britain (indeed, other European countries too and parts of the Southern hemisphere) and 40s USA.

Britain had been ravaged by war since 1939 while the US remained uninvolved until the attack upon Pearl Harbor, whereupon the USA declared war on Japan and, even after the US intervention, the USA and her homes were never subject to hostile bombardment or threat of invasion. This is not a judgement but an observation and the reason it is mentioned is that day-to-day life must surely have been so different for the USA than for Britain and other allied countries – but at a time when American influences in popular culture were increasing so much via radio, Hollywood and other media. Hence the nostalgic imagery of cars, music and fashion.