CASH for TRASH?
Carrie and Boris, eat your heart out! With a £2k skull loo and a £6k hot dog sofa, even king of kitsch LAURENCE LLEWELYN-BOWEN is asking if the new trend for mega-bucks bling is . . .
Apineapple lamp for £900, a black fringe pouf for £21,000, or maybe a peacock dining table for £120,000 might not be to everyone’s taste. But this kind of junky maximalism — or over-the-top kitsch decor, as it will appear to many onlookers — is selling hand over fist with the cognoscenti.
as the socially insecure continue to buy everything from John lewis in shades of oatmeal — allowing them a level of beige control that means they will never judged as being ‘too tasteful’ or ‘too untasteful’ — young, wealthy Carrie antoinettes are heading in the opposite direction. Deliberately smearing kitsch around their homes and buying items that would appal their parents, they are desperate to show how cool they are. They’re turning their backs on what John Betjeman used to call ‘ghastly good taste’ and they’re paying a fortune for it.
On the one hand, who can blame them? The prime Minister’s fiancee Carrie Symonds and her set fear the ‘suburban decor’ of their parents’ generation most of all. Why would she want to copy Theresa May, who made no 10 look like someone’s sitting room in Coulsdon, South london? The introduction of pricey, ugly items and ‘matchy matchy’ decor of the kind sold by Downing Street designer lulu lytle are deliberate style statements. They take the perception of what good taste is, reverse it, get it stuck in the photocopier and reproduce it in retina-crushing palates.
That’s not to say i don’t like them. i’m well known for living in that design space between ghastly and glorious. i know it’s not for everyone. But remember that these colours and confrontational ideas are what led to design revolutions such as Versailles and Rococo. i’d rather be on that side of the
design line than the safe spaces of Scandi chic or mid-century modern design.
Lockdown is partly to blame for this new trend for going ever bigger and bolder. Being imprisoned within four greige walls means that people have gone a bit nuts.
Ordering everything from the internet also means there’s no judgment on whatever you buy for your home any more. You can avoid that moment where you pick up the cushions in raspberry and teal and the shop assistant goes: ‘Really?’ Of course, the prices are astronomical. Customers such as Carrie wouldn’t buy them if they were cheap. Which makes it all the funnier that the end result is meant to look like it is assembled from a charity shop. Would I pay those prices for what I know is, mostly, absolute rubbish? Of course not.
It reminds me of the character that Harry Enfield used to play of the antiques shop salesman flogging tat for a fortune with the words: ‘ I’m just selling stuff, and it’s just stuff and it’s pounds and pounds’ and people would say: ‘Oh, that’s marvellous.’ Smart designers are putting fabulously ridiculous price tags on their items because the more expensive the item, the greater its perceived credentials as a design icon. These objects say: ‘I have got enough creativity, flair and individuality to pay an enormous amount of money for this’ — along with all the other individuals who have also paid an enormous amount of money for it.
That said, don’t judge too harshly. You may think you will never own a pineapple lamp or Medusa head leopard-print cushion. But just as the haute couture fashions on the catwalks work their influence on all of our clothes, in five years’ time perhaps we will all have one of these items — albeit diluted. It will come from one of the more edgy homeware- selling stores such as TK Maxx or H&M, rather than John Lewis. They would never have the guts for that.
For those with cash to burn, there’s no end of in-your-face interiors to choose from. But does an eye-wateringly high price tag always equal impeccable interior style, or are those willing to shell out £900 on a serpent-framed mirror as mad as a snake?