Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990

The catalogue of the Victoria and Albert Museum's 2011 exhibition, the first large museum survey to treat postmodernism as a design movement with a beginning and an end rather than as a condition of contemporary culture.

Edited by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, the book runs from the anti-modernist positions of Venturi, Scott Brown and Hans Hollein around 1970, through the Italian radical groups, Alchimia and Memphis, to the moment in the mid-1980s when the style was absorbed by advertising, corporate architecture and the music industry, and ends with its collapse into commercial mannerism by 1990. Forty-one short essays by the editors and by Paola Antonelli, Charles Jencks, Paul Greenhalgh, David Byrne, Arindam Dutta and others cover architecture, furniture, product and graphic design, fashion, film, television and video. The 250 colour plates include Sottsass's Carlton bookcase, Jean-Paul Goude's images of Grace Jones, Peter Saville's record sleeves and Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia. The exhibition ran at the V&A from 24 September 2011 to 15 January 2012.

Adamson, then head of research at the V&A, has since written Thinking Through Craft and Fewer, Better Things; Pavitt curated the V&A's Cold War Modern (2008). The book is out of print.