Flower Power was a slogan and youth culture movement that emerged in the United States during the mid to late 1960s. The subculture was defined by a belief in peace and non-violence, which was most exemplified by the act of giving out flowers to soldiers during anti-Vietnam war protests, along with exhibiting floral inspired variants on psychedelia 's visual aesthetic and fashion style. The movement served as an early precursor to the American West Coast Hippie scene and was criticized for leading to the start of the Corporate Hippie trend.

In November 1965, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in his essay How to Make a March/Spectacle , urged for anti-Vietnam war protestors to march with "masses of flowers" to hand out to policemen, press and politicians as a form of peaceful non-violent protesting.  By 1966, members of the burgeoning West Coast Hippie movement in California, particularly San Francisco, Berkeley and Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, began to adopt the term "flower power".  In 1967, Californian DJ Lord Tim Hudson coined the term "flower child". The term was adopted by musician Sky Saxon, the front man of American rock band the Seeds, who used the term to refer to fans. Hudson later persuaded the group to write songs such as "March of the Flower Children" for their album Future (1967). The term flower child quickly became a mainstay amongst the flower power movement, with Hudson asserting at the time that he had originally coined "flower power" as well. By the summer, flower power coalesced with the social phenomenon known as the Summer of Love which saw as many as 100,000 hippies converging in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury , along with the March on the Pentagon , which became one of the most important anti-Vietnam war protests of the era.

In late 1967, Mick Farren, a founding member of the British rock band the Deviants and the underground newspaper International Times , was interviewed by John Peel on live TV. During the interview, Peel brought up how during the summer “trendy things like flower power and the hippies” grew in popularity; however, he further stated "the country's still as revolting as it was in the beginning of the summer [...] probably more so". Farren criticized the flower power movement for being a "naive conception" and commercializing the counterculture, citing Frank Zappa’s remark that “flower power is the new way of wrapping garbage.”