The last time you saw a tangerine dress, it was on an unhappy bridesmaid at your cousin's wedding. Now, we see this color and orange and magenta on haute fashion runways splashed throughout bold transcendental prints.

Last year, John Galliano for Christian Dior dumped his previous exotic historical romps through fashion and presented an entire collection based upon the electric-bright palates of the mid sixties and seventies. Always the showman, the change evoked memories of confident women wearing bright fashion and spurred other big designers to follow suit.

This return to organic bright colors paralleled the renewed interest in the Finnish design house Marimekko, where designers like Mika Piirainen create a joyful collection that mixes sixties exuberance with seventies muted sensibilities. The printmaker Ratti works with designers like Prada to create forward-looking organza of pop-out patterns. All are exploring the new intensity of light produced by a singular innovation in the way we see the world.

The innovation is LCD and plasma television and both technologies have changed the way we expect to see the real world. These living room masterworks build dramatic vision in the same way a Chihuly chandelier of twisting organic glass hung in a four story glass atrium shocks one into a trance state of wonder. The interplay of natural light on the glass exploits its translucency in the same primal manner that describes the new television experience. Light is intensified and pushed out through the almost three dimensional objects portrayed on the screen.

The need to repeat this experience in the real world is creating a demand for bright showy looks in fashion, architecture, home furnishings, hair and makeup. This is not to say this is the first time television has changed our perceptions of nature. There is a reason why, in the tsunami of LCD and plasma TV, fashion turns to the sixties and seventies.

In the year 1965, everything changed. Something came along that knocked our fashion sensibilities lose from Pat Boone wearing his White Dickies slacks and tore American youth from their Wrangler blues and Leesures by Lee. It wasn't the Beatles or polyester or pot, although all three jumped on the new wave of youth driven fashion. Instead, it was something we all now take for granted.

It was color television which swept through homes between 1965 and 1967 with Technicolor neon bright cheer. First NBC then all three of the big networks broadcast all programs in color from the morning weather report to the Star Spangled Banner at the end of each broadcasting day. Once America, and then the world, sat in front of color TVs, the real world seemed dimmer somehow and everyone craved the narcotic neon glow of saturated color. Immediately, earth tones, gray and soft pastels were gone from fashion, architecture, clothing and charged brightness sprang up everywhere.

In fashion, it was Mary Quant with her sexy miniskirts, psychedelic Career Club shirts for hip young men, Sammy Davis and his Nehru jackets in plum and gold rust. Your refrigerator suddenly had a thousand faces. Vidal Sassoon took an old idea from Antoine of Paris and created his five point bob to imitate Twiggy lounging about in marshmallow loveseats in a hundred different shades of crazy. To forge these wild fashions, Emilio Pucci pushed out exotic fabric prints, Courrège spilled out space age sculptured designs, and Jarman pumped out smashing shoes in a parade of hues from pumpkin to baby blue. At it was all on the evening news.

Your mother should know, baby, because she was there.

At first, everything looked polished with a plastique shine, but, eventually we all got used to it, went back to pastels and earth tones as color TV became oh too ordinary. But, like junkies, we craved another kick. It came in 1975 on a wind of cocaine and glitter and blew us out of our afghan furs and embroidered kaftans. Disco was darkly lit by spinning shards of glittering glass globes and pulsing lances of magenta primordial light.

Everything was over wrought and intended to be seen in the mayhem of fleeting images caught in strobing music. Shiny nylon and polyester stretch knit fabric seemed to cover every chair, bed, car seat and baby bottom. Women's' elongated legs were draped in billowing swirls of poly-blend colors by Oscar de la Renta and Givenchy. A quavering rhythm (and Paul Mitchell) sent hair styles up and away into a cloud of syncopation. An open hi-hat on the off-beat (and Jose Eber) seduced hair to defy gravity and flair out like a Nordic goddess hunting for a lithe meal.

'Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life…Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television' Andy Warhol