The term vulgar originally meant "of the common people", from the Latin vulgus. The term is now commonly used to describe things that are, from the viewpoint of the person using the word, in bad taste, indecent, or profane.
The major step in the liberation of academia from Latin was the Protestant Reformation which advocated giving Mass (liturgy) and reading from the Bible in vulgar languages. Following in the footsteps of the Reformation, some proponents of the scientific revolution began to establish the precedent for writing in vulgar.
If we compare it to the postmodernism there is at least one big difference between the work of Ettore Sottsass and the others involved in the postmodernist movement from the 70s and 80s and the riders of the new Vulgarism; the lack of an intellectual standpoint and an impugning discussion.
They have continued to work in the same spirit and suddenly they are in the middle of a boosting trend - design in the realm of art - or Vulgarism as we prefer to call it.
Two important persons behind the Vulgarism explosion are the founders of Design Miami and Design Basel, Ambra Medda and Sam Keller.
During Late Antiquity "vulgar Latin" was used to refer to the vernacular dialects that sprang from Latin across the Roman Empire— the predecessors of the modern Romance languages.
One kind of vulgarism, defined by the OED as "a colloquialism of a low or unrefined character," substitutes a coarse word where the context might lead the reader to expect a more refined expression: "the tits on Botticelli's Venus" is a vulgarism.
More broadly, as "vulgarity" generally has a social and moral component, a "vulgarism" offers a substitution for a commonplace that is not a mere euphemism; it draws attention to the speaker's high-toned moral superiority or sophistication.