“It’s Forbidden to Forbid!”, “Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!” and “The more I make love the more I want to make revolution (and vice-versa)” are three street slogans from all the graffiti and banners of Paris in 1968. While impassioned discussions about a new future were ongoing day and night, there was great advocacy of pleasure and free love and the rejection of social customs and norms. From the other side of the Atlantic came echoes of Make Love, Not War. The spirit of the counterculture and flower power was sweeping society.

The music and lyrics of É proibido proibir! that Caetano Veloso sang in 1968 as part of the Tropicália movement greets visitors and sets the scene for what this exhibition seeks to evoke: the late 1960s and the early 1970s as a period of great contestation, experimentalism, multiculturalism with the demolition of statutes and the search for full freedom.

In design, a revolution was also underway. It is this revolution that the exhibition studies as many of the attitudes, researches and reflections of our times find their precedents in this period with their origins resulting from these ruptures and utopias, specifically the awareness and commitment towards the intervention of design (present in the anti-design movements) and the clear taste for experimentation, drawing on other artistic fields.

The exhibition places its emphasis on Europe, especially Italy and Britain, Milan and London respectively and is organised into core themes dealing with: the spirit of counterculture and anti-design, the role of the ephemeral and performance, the experience of the collective and dress wear as a means of protest. The exhibits well reflect the crisis in consumer society, institutions and the prevailing morality that extended throughout the second half of the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Attention focuses on the body, not on some sat, prostrate or standing body but rather a body in freedom, permanently changing position. A body whose undefined position, constantly in movement, demands of the object that it uses and appropriates this same capacity to adjust and live with this same body and compulsively maintaining this ambiguity of position. A body that breaks with authority and seeks out new areas of experience, new ways of sitting and new ways of dressing, all in a logic of pleasure. It is this body that gives shape to the very objects through attitudes of relaxation, pleasure and liberty that transforms them, that endows them with meaning. Correspondingly, one of the typologies under focus is the seat that undergoes transformation. It becomes more ephemeral, performative and modular, nomadic, portraying mentalities changing. Even in the individual sphere, the collective is lived and experienced. Thus, a radical alteration is witnessed in objects and spaces (formal, functional and symbolical) in all forms of experiencing the daily reality. The revolution is in the street and this invades the daily with a contagious burst of energy. It is this very energy that we wish to revisit. Fashion was also caught up by this revolution in new attitudes, mentalities and behaviour: the maxi-skirts that overthrew the miniskirt, symbol of an entire decade, the invasion of colourful printed fabrics, the unisex look, hippy clothing and makeup along with all the psychedelic and ethnic motifs appropriated. Furthermore, street fashion bursts into the world of haute couture. The counterculture of the period gains expression in shock-chic and anti-fashion, the latter more aggressive, with torn or perforated clothing, anti-system and anti-bourgeois slogans, heralding the advent of punk.

Among those featured are: Archizoom Associati, Studio 65, Gruppo Architetti Urbanisti Città, Grupo G14, Grupo Sturm, Superstudio, Eero Aarnio, Pierre Paulin, Verner Panton, Joe Colombo, Gaetano Pesce, Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini, Franco Teodoro, Roberto Matta, Jonathan de Pas, Rodolfo Bonetto, Achille Castiglioni, Marco Zanusso, Gianni Ruffi and Ettore Sottsass. From the world of fashion, Biba, Bill Gibb, Courrèges, Emilio Pucci, Missoni, Mary Quant, Ossie Clark, S'angelo, Thea Couture Porter, Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes are prominent.

The exhibition also incorporates installations featuring a selection of period footage, literature and music by the landmark figures that revolutionised those times.