Gracious: Modern living in post-independence Singapore

In the 1960s, Singapore began a rapid period of urbanisation, altering city and domestic sphere. In 1969, the concept of ‘gracious living’ was introduced to capture the ideal qualities of modern Singapore, but it remained ill-defined. This paper explores the dissemination of gracious living in 1969–75 through Singapore’s popular press. It shows how gracious living was adopted as a counterpart to modernity, transformed, embraced advertising, and came to be derided as empty materialism. Gracious living shows us an important ideological device in Singapore’s programs of nation building and modernisation, and this study attempts to account for the core principles underpinning its uses.