“Let us reform society. No, let us reform the entire world. Down with the tyranny of luxury goods. We are a moral world.”

In the early 1970s the Swedish Co-operative Union (KF) insisted that there should be a war on loss leaders, branded products and market trends, and launched a series of basic clothing and furniture. The use of the term “basic” was no accident. The word signals the very opposite of vanity and excess, suggesting items that are anonymous and timeless, freed from the dictates of short-lived trends.

This presentation describes the main parameters of an ongoing research project in which the overall aim is to study the Swedish Co-operative Union’s ambition of breaking down the traditional rules of the market economy. Through campaigns focusing on basic design in the fields of clothing, furniture and food, the co-operative movement sought to return to its classical ideology. Aesthetics were central in this context and the project seeks to explain how the campaigns were formulated and visualized.

The ideologically profiled initiatives proved to be KF’s death throes. The notion of thrift was totally contrary to the consumer culture of the 1980s and the new market conditions. By tracing the end of KF’s heyday, a subject that has not hitherto been the subject of research, it will also be possible to shed light on more general social developments.