Trend: Past Tense

 

This week I am going to continue my trend reporting because although the main focus of this blog is about tabletop and entertaining (and trust me, I've got some exciting new recipes and serving ideas coming up just in time for fall entertaining with easy to prepare tastes from easily found foods that are easily made with little prep to get you big results!) it is important to know about the trends going on around us.

 

Fashion Week in New York is a big deal because from those fashions the styles trickle down to not only wearable fashions but Home fashions, Home textiles which in turn influence tabletop fashions and home accent products to even the very foods we eat. It all ties together so it’s important that as we live and entertain, our homes, guests and tabletops are all reflections of each other that stay bouncing around in the same fashionable currents.

 

If you’ve seen Devil Wears Prada, remember how Anthony Tucci (as Nigel) and Meryl Streep (as Miranda Priestly) both explain to Anne Hathaway ( as Andy Sachs) how this fashion power trickle down works- and it’s all true!

 

If you haven’t, consider for a moment that people in "rust" polyester pant suits used to eat "wine cheese": this cheese that was half orange and have dyed puplelish burgundy wine-color that was often rolled in nuts and served with Ritz crackers and high fat, cholesterol ridden "pigs in blankets" created from nitrate full little frankfurters with hydrogenated palm oil croissants baked around them (soaking up all the fat).

Now people are wearing natural linen shirts in LEED certified ‘green’ homes and eating sustainable goat and free-range sheep's milk cheese with all natural Stacy’s Pita Chips (sea salt please!) with raw almonds and organic baby arugula salad.

 Believe me now?

 

 

 

 

Ok, Ed, give us more, what’s it all about? Past Tense is a comforting trend to the Nostalgia Look that Baby Boomers and Gen X both feel a certain affinity towards. To the older groups it’s a rummage, antique look and to the younger scale it’s a vintage or retro industrial return to the interest of how things were made, especially hand-crafted items. Last week I talked about wire and wood, here the same materials, like the Tin Galvanized letters and the accents like basketry and wooden bobbins seen above show.

 

In the photo above we can see ceramic glove forms and wooden heads that milliners would use for hats as well as shop craft stools and in the back you can see wooden vises and tool boxes. Even the spherical lights above are nods to pre-electric ships lanterns, where the flame would be limited by the surrounding cage and not be able to bang against a wall and set off a fire if a wave made the boat sway.

 

Past Tense feeds our curiosity about the cross over times between the pre-industrial and industrial revolution. Look at the interest in the Titanic as much as the first moon walks. The world was going from Victorian times to the early 1900's when woman’s rights, morals, flappers and prohibition changed the way people think, their manners and dress. In unsure times, dare I say election times, nostalgia is very attractive because it allows us to remember times when the world was more in control, expected and we weren’t as challenged in many ways as we are now. Past Tense signals us to think of a more hands on world and puts us back in touch with tactile crafted materials.