Here's a post I saved. Haven't read in awhile, but knew I had it:
I think every style has the potential to become classic. Part of it has to do with psychological distance. Think of a curvaceous Chippendale ribbon-back chair from say, 174O. Today, that style is classic. In 1800, the same style was hopelessly dated, and the trend-followers--who are, like the poor, always with us, and who could afford to buy a roomful of pieces in the hot new style coming out of Paris, pieces with acres of flashy veneers & gold-plated trim--lost no time in sending that dated old Chippendale stuff to the servants' quarters. By 185O, the square, humorless Empire pieces of 1800 were on the outs, and heavily carved parlor suites with massively curved shiny backs, bulgy arms & short, squatty legs came into style. In 1900, the Empire stuff was being revived, the cartoonishly florid Victorian stuff was being broken up for firewood & the Chippendale stuff was being acquired by major museums & robber barons. In other words, "classic" is whatever the powers that be tell us it is. My advice? Pay no attention to labels, especially labels coined by the marketing boys on Madison Avenue. What do you call classic?
When I was in college, junk stores were full of chunky fumed-oak Mission furniture upholstered in black leather. They couldn't give it away. Twenty years ago, the same thing was true of the spiky-legged, bright-colored 5Os-Modern pieces that now provide the inspiration for everything at IKEA. Even ten years ago, top-quality mirrored furniture from the 193Os languished unwanted in the dusty back rooms of pricy antique shops, waiting for its chance for a comeback.
Well, the Mission/A&C revival caught me off guard, and so did the new enthusiasm for MCM stuff, but on my first day of class in design school--clear back in 1990, years before anybody ever heard of Jonathan Adler or Kelly Wearstler--I stood up in front of the class & predicted the return of the style and the restoration of the reputation of Dorothy Draper. Everybody howled with laughter.
So what's my point? That any style has the potential to be--or to become--"classic." What makes the difference is how well any style is interpreted. But don't worry about classifying rooms as being in certain styles. Names mean nothing. If you had told Ernest Hemingway you were going to decorate your living room in "Ernest Hemingway style" he wouldn't have known what the hell you were talking about, unless that you were going to using the same faded floral chintz as the slipcovers in his living room in Cuba.
Hemingway? Slipcovers? Faded floral chintz? Shabby Chic faded chintz? You see the problem with trying to label things. They seldom have any relation to reality.
Here's a photo of a room I find really appealing for its rustic simplicity: an unpretentious iron bed, wide-plank walls & ceiling, a calico hanging behind the bed, rag rugs on the floor, an eclectic mix of mix-matched wicker chairs & more substantial case pieces, inexpensive art prints in plain frames, a lamp with the shade at a jaunty angle, and at the windows and on the beds, fresh white linens. It might almost be a studio-built set for a Ralph Lauren towels ad. But no, it's a makeshift home created inside an old boxcar by a migrant worker in the Arizona desert in 1911, and if you called its decor "Shabby Chic", the hardscrabble farm wife who tried to make it attractive would have chased you out the door with a shotgun.
For our purposes here, though, the question is "At what point does a place like this change from a scorching, squalid crib for hard-luck folks barely making a living to a romanticized, middle-class fantasy of the simple life?" You see the power--for good & for bad--of putting labels on things. Would a rose, by any other name, smell as sweet?
Regards,
MAGNAVERDE.
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everything
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