Summer of Love Brand

A few quotes from a NYTimes article about the reemergence of the Summer of Love "Hippie" Brand that has been reemerging recently, and how the media created/ shaped that moment in youth culture history.

"The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon."

"Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the one it actually became."

“Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”