‘Apologies if the Bright, Vivid Colors Sear Your Eyes’
If Amity Shlaes ever writes about Depression-era interior design, I wonder if she’d call her book, The Forgotten Ottoman?
A couple of days ago, I referenced Virginia Postrel’s great “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn” post from late 2008, specifically the first half, in which she indicted the Obama-supporting journalists who longed for a New Depression to accompany the president they had self-styled as the second coming of FDR. (A Sorelian myth if there ever was one). But the second half of Postrel’s post focused on designers and corporate artists who also lusted after a new seemingly-permanent Depression. As she wrote:
ReadyMade magazine, whose founders’ experience with economic downturns is limited to the dot-com bust, calls on designers to imagine New Deal-style propaganda for a New Depression:
How might the current government stem the tide of economic and psychological depression? Can artists and designers help in similar ways today? It’s curious that the WPA style has been reprised in the recent past as a quaint retro conceit, but today may be an opportune time for a brand-new graphic language—equal in impact to the original initiative, but decidedly different—to help rally the cause of hope and optimism.
Oh the thrill of imagining a Great Depression. It’s an opportunity for Great Design and Really Cool Government.
That was almost two years ago, when designers and copywriters thought they saw a hot new trend to ride. You’d think by now they were ready for some Reagan-era sunny optimism, (or heck, even a little FDR-style sunny optimism) but what arrived in the mail yesterday was the greatest slab of retail Depression Porn I’ve seen yet.
In the past, Restoration Hardware had a sort of Ralph Lauren approach to furniture and design. Walking into their Palo Alto store in particular is like visiting one of Ralph’s stores: it’s the best of the mid-century past, but clean and shiny and stripped down and expensive. For hardware details and curios, it’s a great place to shop; I want to preface the rest of this post by saying I really like the place; a great deal of the accessories in my home, from the chrome numbers on the exterior of the house to the water glass holder in the master bath came from there.
I’m just not sure what got into the water supply at corporate HQ this year, though. To tie it in with another post earlier this week on journalists, Rush noted that they seem to be writing for themselves these days, not for any sort of audience — they’ve written them off by spending the last two years describing three-quarters of America as racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc. (As I joked to my wife yesterday, do I want to watch MSNBC tonight and be called a racist, or CNN and be dubbed an Islamophobe….?)
We know now that a great deal of the punitive tone of the ancien regime’s media for the past couple years first bubbled out of the JournoList, but was there also some meeting a few months ago where catalog copywriters also decided that, “Screw it, Christmas sales will likely suck like a Hoover this year, nobody’s buying anything, the GOP could take back Congress, life stinks, so let’s just write the craziest stuff we can think of and put it out there. Hey, at least we’ll have cool tearsheets in our scrapbooks to show off when looking for new jobs, when the economy finally does pick up.” Or perhaps they simply tried to imagine the mindset of the average Obama-voting Prius-driving resident of Palo Alto and Marin, and wrote accordingly.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the photos of the otherwise thin new Restoration Hardware catalog that arrived in the mail yesterday are a hoot: “BEHOLD OUR FALL COLLECTION” the cover blurts in all caps, but it’s all muted — oh boy is it muted — after that. I’m absolutely certain they actually punched the colors and contrast up on their Website; they’re much, much flatter looking in the printed catalog. (I adjusted the above photos to match their patina in the catalog.) Did you ever see Woody Allen’s Interiors, his first drama shot in 1978 and glacially paced, where Geraldine Page plays the film’s matriarch, a depressed middle aged wealthy New York interior decorator obsessed with beige and taupe and earth tones? If her medication permitted it, she’d be thrilled by this catalog’s arrival.
On his Bleat this morning, James Lileks wrote:
You know those scenes in horror movies where the heroine has a haunted dream, and everything’s desaturated, with dead leaves blowing around? Well: the new Restoration Hardware catalog arrived today. It’s like that.
Apologies if the bright, vivid colors sear your eyes. The dead muted palette has a purpose: the preface specifically ties the new look to “the global economic collapse,” and seems to suggest you should buy these things so you can position yourself as an aesthetic curator of the best of pre- and post-industrial civilization.
Click over for more photos at Lileks’ site; as James writes, “My God, who died?”
The desaturated monochromatic taupey-brown taupeness of all the rooms was just bizarre, but the catalog’s J. Peterman-style intro from the firm’s chairman reads like something out of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man, or in particular, that “Depression Lust/Depression Porn” from Virginia Postrel quoted above. It’s awfully subtle, but see if you can spot the theme of his introduction:
“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”
Pablo Picasso, one of the world’s preeminent artists and influencers of the 20th century, repeatedly broke down stylistic conventions and was undaunted by the art world’s status quo. His irreverent spirit, captured in the quote above, was unfettered as he pursued his calling and followed his muse – great art that answered to no one, yet inspired everyone.
During the collapse of the global economy, we drew inspiration from Picasso’s words and chose not to listen to the conventional wisdom encouraging us to follow the pack and lower quality to reduce prices. Instead, we saw an opportunity to be liberated, abandoning our past to embrace the future, one that has redefined the essence of who we are. No longer mere “retailers” of home furnishings, we are now “curators” of the best historical design the world has to offer.
We’ve destroyed the previous iteration of ourselves, clearing the way to express our brand in a never-before-seen fashion.
I know I’m about to violate 32 flavors and then some of Godwin’s Law with this, but I swear, when the catalog first arrived yesterday, and I read all those references to the benefits of destruction, I instantly recalled the ravings of Robert Ley, the head of the National Socialist Labor Front, who looked at the charred moonscape of Dresden in February of 1945 and claimed to see nothing but the “Starting From Zero” upside to it to all:
“After the destruction of beautiful Dresden, we almost breathe a sigh of relief. It is over now. In focusing on our struggle and victory we are no longer distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture. Onward!…Now we march toward the German victory without any superfluous ballast and without the heavy spiritual and material bourgeois baggage”.
Fortunately, this time around, one can experience the Downfall with furniture truly fit for a pre-postmodern bourgeois-bohemian gauleiter.
Or maybe the retail chain knows where the California economy is really headed next year…
Related: No word yet if this currency is legal tender yet at Restoration Hardware.
Related: Found via the Freepers (and thanks for stopping by!), it’s hard out there for a hipster.
Too bad.
I liked their stuff, but their new “identity” seems to be pretentious, overpriced, Californian, with the requisite overblown opinion of themselves….
BOYCOTTED.
Dang! They should have sent out this issue ten years ago! All these years of my family trying to RESTORE an old farmhouse and now they tell us that we should have liberated our minds and just destroyed the old building!
What a bizarre message to be promulgated by a company with the word RESTORATION in its name!
I’ll second Mike’s “too bad” and join his boycott.
I can see it now … Frank Rich’s column the day after the election this November:
“After the destruction of our beautiful Democratic Congress, we almost breathe a sigh of relief. It is over now. In focusing on our struggle and victory we are no longer distracted by concerns for the opinions of the stupid, ignorant peasants. Onward! … Now we march toward the inevitable Progressive victory without any superfluous ballast and the dead weight of the bitter clingers in our Party.”
That’s great!
Murgatroyd,
Hey, Henry Waxman is practicing that riff already!
I can’t believe this, for a year now I have been trying to put my finger on this new RH look. It kept reminding me of a 1920′s insane asylum, some creepy mad scientist’s laboratory. The chairs look like they might be used for strapping you in for a torture session. Think Hanibal’s mask, The whole look freaks me out, it is like some horror movie set in gloomy Vienna.
You know when very self indulgent artists try to pass of ugly as beautiful. Or is it the movie Metropolis.
A quote i found made about the film Metropolis:
“By the way, nowadays one keeps running into an artistic style that the National Socialists would call ‘volkisch’ (= characteristic of the German race). There’s a touch of that in Fritz Lang. That’s where his huge pathos-filled spaces belong, with tiny human figures in them. This is true of his big contrasts in general, and particularly those gigantic formats that are not sufficiently filled with life from the inside, and therefore leave us empty.”
It’s also macabre Frankensteinish. Or think assembly line in Chaplin’s Modern Times.
It’s the look of a lifeless communist Utopia a bleak dystopian future, melding the look of Victorian England, the Industrial Revolution, contraptions that H.G. Wells might have dreamed up.
Soviet Russia, A Clockwork Orange all come to mind to.
I guess when you take away FREDOM you deaden the soul, the world becomes a lifeless place, to think all those elitist types have been convinced this is beautiful is the joke in all of this.
I just did a bit of research and actually discovered that their is a name for the style it’s called STEAMPUNK read here:
http://morewaystowastetime.blogspot.com/2009/03/inspiration-steampunk-style.html
This too is interesting re the film Metropolis:
But Lang had no desire to assume a key position in National Socialist film production. Strong-willed and independent, a firm believer in freedom, he could never bring himself to conform to the Weltanschauung of the New Order. “. . . Many people have forgotten what freedom means,” Lang noted in a 1973 interview with Charles Champlin, recalling his meeting with Goebbels. “When I came in 1934 to this country, it was the land of the free. And I learned here about a song that was sung at the start of the century and it goes: ‘Freedom doesn’t come like a bird on the wind; freedom doesn’t come like a summer rain; freedom, freedom is a very hard earned thing.’ And every generation has to earn it again.” The Goebbels interview confirmed Lang’s decision to leave Germany.
I would argue that Steampunk is optimistic. It is intended to evoke Victorian England, when empire was at its height, the middle class grew and gained power, the Industrial Revolution was stimulating societal upheaval and creative destruction (as opposed to the depressed stasis of the Great Depression), and a scientific invention or technological innovation was coming along every five minutes.
Modern ideas of art are made for the scam artist. Beginning with Picasso and through Warhol, pretension trumps talent all the way. I used to paint a lot as a young lad. It’s a lot more fun to try to capture the light on water than to splash paint around, sprinkle meaningful drops on a canvas and show it off as brilliance. The good commercials on TV don’t insult us, they raise a smile more often than not. The fake social conscience and profound philosophy make us want to puke. The New Depression art is depressive.
What makes me smile about commercials on TV is the fact that God gave us remotes and the large and small motor skills to use them without interrupting the book I’m reading as well, or the crochet project I’m working on.
I truly can’t remember the last time I heard or saw an ad. It’s not that hard to pick up the timing and length of them….so the remote lays there on the book table, and the instant the few programs I watch click away to an ad–click mute.
The Restoration people should try visiting Lileks’ website. He has lots of magazine ads from the Thirties on display, and the drawings (as opposed to the photos which are of course b/w) are in bright, cheery colors – kitchens in gleaming white and screaming red – that sort of thing.
Anyway, if they’re going to bring back Thirties fashions, let’s start with women’s clothing. I would love to see gracefully draped, midcalf-length dresses which are designed for women and not for anorexic eleven-year-old boys.
Yes, and lovely, feminine hats with miles of tulle and netting, and perfectly coiffed hair that doesn’t look like a gothic’s stiff punk hair sticking all over the place.
And the Depression Chic furnishings (and what more depressing than a replica of an old French dentist’s chair, with all the pain & suffering it implies!) are perfectly set off by the Dust Bowl color pallette.
I need a drink.
I, too, received this catalog yesterday and recoiled in horror at its contents. I needed to read this article to understand the collection’s intent because after quickly flipping through it, I deposited it (unread) into my recycle trash.
Just a couple of points: aside from its overwhelming aura of decay, the collection has a couple of practical issues I have a beef with. It is also overwhelmingly MASCULINE. The whole thing could be characterized as a decadent den for the “man of the house.” In addition, the pieces are all out of scale with ordinary room sizes. At the exact moment when average home sizes are shrinking, McMansions are out of style, and most people are down-sizing, this collection comes along to poke a thumb in the eye of the average Dick or Jane.
They may be striving for art, but I doubt that many will spend good money on this over-scaled, pretentious, faux antique junk.
It’s as if they hired Moira Brown as their designer.
This is worse than some of the stuff in recent issues of Dwell (architecture and design mag). I used to love the mag but now I’m loving their parodies at http://www.unhappyhipsters.com
Bill–thank you for the link. Love it!
I’ve been a customer since back in the days of the typed and Xerox copied price listing of early 20th century hardware for sale. I was living in a rented 1920s era house and needed to replace a few pieces of hardware and all the “modern stuff” looked out of place, and there weren’t that many “vintage parts” for sale.
I’ve even worked for the company in a couple of its stores over the years. It has changed, more so over the last 2 years to be more “Pottery Barn,” than Pottery Barn. Many long time customers that really liked the dateless mid-20th century styles (anywhere from 1920s to 1940s reproduction) of furniture ARE NOT HAPPY right now.
Where up to last year they could come in an “finish a room” that they had started buying furniture for a decade ago, now they can’t! Nearly all the “lines” were discontinued, and this “fake” European antique stuff started to come in.
Has anyone else ever noticed that the 1930s are the favorite decade of PBS?
Does this mean their NEA grant application was approved?
Modern art: “created by the untalented, sold by the unscrupulous, purchased by the unknowing.”
When I looked through the Restoration Hardware catalog, my initial thoughts on the Restoration Hardware were similar. “How bizarre and drab”. Being a professional in the home furnishings business, I have seen nothing like this in the field. This is not a trending style or look in the industry. This was an “agenda statement” catalog for a company that may be once again looking straight into the eyes of Chapter 11 or even Chapter 7.
RH going bankrupt? That’s old news, (but yes they are not doing as well now as they were doing at the height of the ‘dot com’ bubble burst). I personally expect it to close all the stores within a year, 18 months max.
It was brave of them to not actually lower their prices as they push Economic Collapse Chic.
“Economic Collapse Chic”– that so encapsulates what I was thinking. This is a catalog for people who confuse actual austerity with merely decorating in drab colors.
Noble words from the head of Restoration Furniture. I too like shopping in their stores and I think the quality is very good on the products I have purchased there. The quality of the furniture is we have from there is first rate.
However, they are still a profit making concern and such sentiment sounds better from a museum curator than the head of a publicly traded company. Cheaper may not be fun, but if it’s at least profitable, go for it.
Is drab the new design aesthetic? Sure fits the economy. Who wants to celebrate that? Might match the design aesthetic of the government run unemployment office.
“Apologies if the Bright, Vivid Colors Sear Your Eyes” — which post came first: this or Lileks’? http://lileks.com/bleat/?p=7867
Projecting images of their own nihilism, Restoration Hardware deigns to insist that others share their indulgence.
They need to get back on their meds, first, and then move to the real world. Try North Carolina. Real people live there, not just coddled trust-funders and dot-com derelicts sheep-dipped in the soulless brine of progressive (sic.: regressive) thought.
In the real world, people reject the drab for life-affirming colors, not some putty-primed pallete from the middle of dust-bowl Kansas.
Once they realize (as many are waking to) that it is OK to be a fiscal Conservative and a lover of small government, and that zealous capitalism and strong defense have indeed made America the exceptional nation that she is.
[Reasoner: Proud to be a Southerner!]
Hmm, I really liked everything in the new catalog–especially the the stuff on page 53. That doesn’t make me a Democrat, does it?
Everything they know about the Depression they learned from the movie “Grape of Wrath”. They didn’t even read the book.
Everything the left believes is based on Hollywood’s portrayal. They have no imagination so the images placed in their minds give them all they think they need to understand exactly how something was. They are incredibly gullible if you add some pictures.
I absolutely love the letter bragging about how they decided to charge at least as much as they did before even though there’s this tremendously inspiring global economic collapse. If they knew anything about the Depression (and they’ll soon learn it, I expect) those peasants who used to buy those expensive crystal drawer pulls for a their hand-me-down vanity won’t be able to afford them so they’ll go someplace that sells something else they can live with.
People who think the Depression era was all dull and brown/taupe ought to take a look at some actual 1933-1934 design, the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair.
Bright cheerful color and Art Deco EVERYWHERE:
http://www.google.com/images?q=century%20of%20progress&biw=1600&bih=686
Maybe my collection will be going up in value soon.
Been into the Palo Alto store many times, the Depression Era motif is usually handled well enough by teh bums and panhandlers outside on University Avenue. But on seeing the new catalog that arrived in the mail I had to think, “This is suicide, with a product line so ugly, monochromatic and expensive, the company is going to tank.”
Reproducing their perception of depression era furnishings and colors and pricing them for far more than the real deal is preposterous. The genuine articles are abundant and quite reasonable.
Our 1920′s house has several items from RH in it, mostly small stuff like cabinet handles and hand lotion. When we received the catalogue the other day, I thought for a moment that it was a parody. I told my husband it looked like a cross between Gay Goth and Vampire funeral home. How out of touch are these folks? And why are they so pleased with themselves?
Dreary and miserable is the new black.
For some reason this makes me think about an article up on Huffington post about this writer
who decided to spend a year without money. They make it sound all eco-conscious and greeny
but it was nothing like that. His was no grand Into The Wild adventure, no Walden Pond.
It wasnt some experiment in sustainable living or organic farming.
He ate from dumpsters, lived in an abandoned trailer, basically
turned himself into a depression era hobo, did some farm work for food, and the progressives think
it was all so cool, like there is some glory in misery for its own sake.
Well off liberals are gonna love this catalog. It is like poverty with style.
Spindok
Yay for vampires! I really want to be one. Edward is so freakin’ hot!