Grounded in jazz but spiced with exotic instruments, this forgotten genre of music was rescued in the 1990s by audiophiles and dubbed Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Built from scratch and at great expense, it was specially tuned to play the latest in sophisticated mood music. In contrast, the high-tech stereo was a testament to the latest in sound technology. Inside the colorful bottles were magic elixirs capable of unleashing primitive desires stifled by Western Civilization.
The bar sported a tiki theme and was covered with Polynesian bric-a-brac from mail-order catalogs. Located on the penthouse floor of a modern skyscraper, the bachelor’s apartment had two focal points: The bar and the hi-fi system. He stalked the savannah of his office, with its abundance of skirts-suited secretaries, the nightclub (his real work began after five), and his personal sanctuary, that automated temple of seduction known as the bachelor pad. Just as it was for Oscar Wilde’s drawing-room dandies, the swinging bachelor’s domain was an interior one. The jackpot was a foreign stewardess: Beautiful, exotic, and only in town for a night. There were buxom blonde bombshells aping Marilyn Monroe, and ponytailed brunettes strapped into capri pants, quoting Jack Kerouac and smoking French cigarettes. With Playboy the swinging bachelor could keep up on all the latest trends, from the mambo to psychoanalysis, while dreaming alternately of taking a yacht to the South Pacific and a rocket to the moon.īeing single does not mean being alone, and for the Atomic Age bachelor on the prowl the prey was never more tantalizing. The magazine was a veritable how-to guide for the upwardly mobile young professional, its pages packed with the spoils of la dolce vita: stylish clothes, convertible sports cars, jazz music and tropical cocktails. With a well paying office job and the benefits of the growing sexual revolution, the “swinging bachelor” could cultivate a carefree and sybaritic lifestyle based on everything that was modern and hip.įounded in 1953, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy became the bible of this modern male. Fresh from victory in World War II and gorged on the fruits of affluence, American men developed a democratized, pop form of dandyism for the masses, a cult of style and leisure based on the carefree life of bachelorhood. Click here for a large version and dream away.Įvery generation has its destiny, and for the young men of the Atomic Age, it was nothing less than to have the world as their oyster - and wash it down with a dry martini.īetween 1954-1964 a new masculine archetype flourished. And reading the piece over, some of the passages suggest themes and motifs that would later capture public consciousness via “Mad Men.”Ībove is probably the most notable of Playboy magazine’s fantasy illustrations of the ultimate bachelor pad.
It’s a testament to the fascinating, meandering journey of life that 11 years later I’d return to the topic with a website devoted to men’s living spaces. The story ran in Italian, so below is my original written in the language of America. Later, for the January, 2004 issue of L’Uomo Vogue, I wrote a short piece on the space-age bachelor, who more or less became extinct - along with a lot of other things - in the late ’60s and who haunted the years after Vietnam and Watergate as a kind of louche and ghostly caricature.
#SPACE AGE BACHELOR PAD MOVIE#
I watched every movie I could find, and when those dried up, resorted to reading academic studies on “postwar male consumption,” such as “ Playboys In Paradise: Masculinity, Youth And Leisure-Style In Modern America.” But that was mostly just to discover movies I hadn’t seen yet. Some 15 years ago I became fascinated by the midcentury phenomenon of the so-called “space-age bachelor,” whose native environment was his space-age bachelor pad.
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