Whether it’s LED tree-toppers on the shelf at Urban Outfitters or a psychedelic, water-wheel-sized installation on the sales floor at Barneys New York, the peace symbol has become the unofficial symbol of this holiday season. Two long-running wars, a frenzied election cycle and the symbol’s 50th birthday this year have combined to push the hippie relic into the public eye in a way it hasn’t been for decades.
So this year you can have a cool yule with peace symbol ice cube trays, baby bibs and swimsuits. You can find it stitched into $250 cashmere throw pillows, enameled into $400 cuff links and hand-painted onto $2,000 purses. And it was recently announced that Shawn Johnson, the plucky 16-year-old Olympian who back-flipped into our hearts in Beijing while sporting a dangly pair of peace sign earrings, soon is launching a line of peace-bedazzled leotards.
Winding from the corner of Haight-Ashbury to the holiday window display at Barneys New York, what a long, strange trip it’s been for the icon of the ’60s counterculture, just three straight lines inside a circle.
Photographer Ken Kolsbun, who has chronicled the life and times of the symbol for four decades (his book with Michael S. Sweeney, “Peace: The Biography of a Symbol,” was published in April), said the design was the creation of a British textile designer named Gerald Holtom, who hit on the now-indelible image by melding the semaphore signals for the letters “N” (both arms down stretched at 45 degree angles) and “D” (arms parallel, left arm down, right arm up) to represent the words “nuclear disarmament.” It made its public debut at a ban-the-bomb march in London’s Trafalgar Square on April 4, 1958.
“Ten days later, Life magazine ran a photo from that march, which was its first appearance in the U.S.,” Kolsbun said by phone. It caught on stateside, he said, thanks to the antiwar movement, which he credits with broadening the symbol’s meaning beyond nuclear protest. And the symbol has been percolating through American pop culture ever since.
Its popularity seems to be cyclical, Kolsbun notes. “After the Vietnam War there was a lull, but they seemed to crop up in the ’80s with the (cuclear weapons) freeze campaign, and again around the time the second Iraq war broke out. My wife and I were at a big rally in San Francisco and the symbol was all over the place,” he said.
This time around, stores including Target and Saks Fifth Avenue have looked for ways to twist the peace sign into a dollar sign, and few retailers have hopped on the peace train as enthusiastically as Barneys New York. Creative director Simon Doonan, inspired by the symbol’s anniversary, has tricked out the high-end retailer’s windows and sales floor with a hodgepodge of psychedelic grooviness dubbed “hippie holidays” — think quasi-water-pipe pottery, trippy paisleys and a platoon of peace signs knit into $68 socks, embroidered onto $110 diaper bags and painted onto a VW Beetle (the car is being raffled for $100 a ticket). An 8-foot-tall mock-decoupaged version of the peace symbol stands sentinel inside the front door of the Beverly Hills store.
The irony of using hippie to hawk high-end isn’t lost on Doonan. “I always thought it was kind of amusing,” he said. “But our core customer is a baby boomer who has inherited parental wealth — or maybe they’ve made their own money — but they still think of themselves as alternative, and the imagery of the counterculture still resonates with them.”
Does slapping a $310 custom-painted peace sign onto a $1,695 Goyard Croisiere handbag mean the sacred symbol of the “never trust anyone over 30” generation has been sold out?
“It would make a nifty story for journalists to say (the peace sign is) being cheapened,” Doonan said. “Even though it’s been made into handbags and earrings and cupcakes and hair clips, the peace symbol has still very much retained its original meaning — it still means peace.”
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