- #Keep calm and carry on meme full#
- #Keep calm and carry on meme tv#
- #Keep calm and carry on meme windows#
What do you know about the history of the poster? The original Keep Calm and Carry On poster in Barter Books, Alnwick. It looked like it was from the period of the war, and I thought, "Why are these people comparing the lack of trains running from Greenwich to Charing Cross with the idea of the Nazis bombing London?" And then a few months later, it was also constantly invoked during the tube strike.
#Keep calm and carry on meme windows#
I walked from Greenwich to Blackheath, and everywhere I looked, in the windows of the houses, there seemed to be this poster. I think it was winter of 2008 or 2009, when there was really heavy snow, which caused the train system in London to collapse. When did you first become aware of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster? And this sense of hysteria and narcissism from people pretending to be decent and moral is sort of what the book is about. It doesn't have a sense of decency, even. I was trying to work out if these people actually know what a workhouse is… and I'm still not entirely sure they do.Īusterity nostalgia tends to present itself as if it's to do with rectitude or morally correct behavior-the British stiff upper lip and all of that-but actually it's completely hysterical and has no sense of historical perspective. And rather than it being presented as a time of grim poverty that people should be glad we've escaped from, it's become part of our wonderful national narrative. It made me think, "What next?" In their world, anything that acts as a sign of their authenticity is good-it doesn't matter what it is, even the workhouse.
The workhouse was basically a centralized concentration camp for enforced labor, and the idea of a fucking clothing label using this as a way of describing the authenticity of their historical roots is incredible. I find the idea of a fey clothing label producing designs based on what the inmates of a workhouse would have worn in the Victorian era mind-boggling.
And that was the clothing label, Workhouse England. There was one thing that I chanced across last week that confirmed that austerity nostalgia is not going away, and if anything, I've been under-exaggerating this phenomena. But in the length of time it took me to actually get around to writing it-six years-I presumed the design would go away. Owen Hatherley: It's really odd-I first wrote about the Keep Calm and Carry On poster in an essay in 2009. VICE: How relevant is Keep Calm and Carry On and austerity nostalgia in 2016?
#Keep calm and carry on meme tv#
He terms this trend "austerity nostalgia" and has noted examples of it in London architecture, in the cookery of Jamie Oliver, in affluent men dressing like Victorian strongmen and affluent women dressing like Rosie the Riveter, in TV shows such as Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife, not to mention the music of Public Service Broadcasting and Mumford and Sons. Hatherley, who has made a name for himself writing about modern architecture and pop culture, argues convincingly that the recent popularity of the poster design is a symptom of a wider cultural shift that has happened in the UK since the financial crash of eight years ago. The poster on its own isn't much more than an irritating fad, but it represents one small facet of a bigger trend. Isn't it just a poster, though? Well, yes and no, the argument goes. So it seems that the best part of a decade after it first became popular, Keep Calm and Carry On shows no sign of fucking off and dying. If I was in any doubt, less than 24 hours before my interview with Hatherley, the UK government launched its Clean for the Queen campaign, which featured Boris Johnson, and 70 other MPs, crammed into bright purple T-shirts featuring a very familiar font and crown logo. (All of this is probably down to the fact that the poster is long out of copyright, meaning it can be reproduced by anyone.)
#Keep calm and carry on meme full#
The design is still to be found crammed into the racks in Hallmark shops it is all over iPhone covers on sale at the market near where I work tourist tat shops are full of it it's on sales notices in clothing shops, and it still crops us as parodic stencil graffiti, as well as being incorporated into the design of flyers and ads. When I was researching this feature and actually went out of my way to look for it, I was dismayed to discover that, if anything, Keep Calm and Carry On seems to be healthier than ever-even if you don't see it on T-shirts so much any more.
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