Book Review: Technicolor Dreamin': The 1960's Rainbow and Beyond by Karen Moller

If you're interested in the private lives of people who make the fashion world, how they started and how they got to the top, you might want to pick up a copy of Karen Moller's memoir, Technicolor Dreamin': The 1960's Rainbow and Beyond.

In her fresh and engaging voice, award-winning fashion designer and consultant Moller takes us on a trip through time. She was a rebel, a restless, idealistic teen in rural Canada, who decided to leave home and hitchhike to pursue her dreams, witnessing and experiencing the counter-culture revolution of the '60s and '70s in San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris, working with such celebrities as Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and The Beatles, and creating her successful fashion consulting firm, Trend Union, in 1985.

The memoir starts in the present time with Moller having a conversation with her young niece Adele, who wants to postpone her university education in order to travel and see the world. Moller advises her to read a copy of Kerouac's On the Road, a book that she read back in the '50s and that had an immense influence on her outlook on life. The book offered young Moller courage in her pursuit of creative freedom and encouraged her to hitchhike her way to San Francisco.

“Kerouac had seemed like some kind of God, a sort of prophet sent to liberate us from the conformist middle class lives we were being programmed to live,” writes Moller.

Moller talks about her childhood, dealing with a mother who had no time for a girl and a father who was irrational, self-centered, and insensitive. Moller’s dreams and creativity made her different in the eyes of her family. “I became a family joke,” she writes.

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Article Author: Mayra Calvani

Mayra Calvani writes fiction and nonfiction for children, teens and adults. She also offers online workshops on the art of reviewing and picture book writing at SavvyAuthors.com.


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