While Van Toorn's argument is strong, promising design trends usually do evolve from rebellious at birth to corporatist at death. I'm not sure you can stop that, a good idea slowly becomes modified as more people see it and reinterpret it in their own way. What started at the Bauhaus turned into logos for oil companies and banks. And as Marie's post reminds us, postmodernism and niche marketing make it pretty impossible to ever have a graphic design concept that never ends up seeing some sort of corporate application.
Even rebellions rooted in intentionally creating things that are "ugly" eventually become stylized. This Design Observer article, discussing the new ugly of 2007 has since seen more stylized applications at Urban Outfitters. With that kind of visibility, perhaps we're 10 years away from Ann Taylor using typographic treatments on their marketing materials that would have been considered avant garde in 2005.
Becky points out Fairey as an example of a designer who advocates social change through his work, and he does. But his work has become a commercial commodity (two of the images in Becky's post are for Obey). He did the design for a mainstream comedian's show on a cable network (Russel Brand's Brand-X on FX) and his style has been replicated and parodied in too many contexts to keep track of.
It's fairly impossible to protect an aesthetic from falling into "the wrong hands" like a band you like eventually being followed by people you would never want to be associated with. That kind of creative exposure and evolution comes with graphic design too.
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