Welcome to the atomic era, when Russia and the USA had the whole world in suspense with their nuclear pulse and with the struggle for the conquest of Space.
Technology advanced lots giving hope to the citizens and influenced fashions with new shapes and materials, the nuclear threat was feared and publicized at the same time in USA, and the Space Race started in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik rocket. All this made the world of design to capture this moment for posterity from fabrics, through household items and even jewelry with atomic brooches or starburst brooches with those concentric star motifs imitating the shape of an atom and with those shines with which any of us who could have quickly identified what era was just by looking at the lapels.
Other discoveries that had a direct impact on the era were those in the field of materials, specially plastics that had advanced a lot during the Second World War and that gave patents like Dupont's Lucite. Those materials, began to be seen in the 40s but, as time progressed to the following decades, they were more and more present until they experienced a real boom in the 60s, specially in jewellery so acrylic starbursts were quite common too.
But although we humans distract ourselves with these kinds of things to alleviate our real concerns, the technology of the time was highly destructive so it was an era of great uncertainty and fear and also an era that imagined a future that was not such but that left us a huge legacy of geniuses such as Courrèges, Rabanne or Cardin with their impossible lines of perfect seams and their innovative materials, that left us movies, series and comics of flying cars like the Jetsons and lots of objects to remember it and relive again and again the fantasy of what it could have been.