ABSTRACT
As in the pre-war years, so after 1945 design continued to carry with it the potential to represent nations and their desire to project their identities on to the world at large. This was the case both for those countries that sought to cast off their links with pre-war fascism and those which had had democratic systems in place before the war. Thus, Germany, Italy and Japan all embraced modern design as a means of forging new, post-war modern identities for themselves, while Britain, the USA and Sweden, among other countries, also used it as a key strategic means of enabling them to enter new international marketplaces. In all cases, those countries used the sophisticated programmes that had been developed in the context of wartime propaganda in the context of peace. They all understood that the promise of a new lifestyle, provided by the consumption of new modern goods, was an important means of uniting their populations and of moving forward into a new era.
