Croak couture
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elimination of wood, cotton, and wool as materials and fast fashion/plastic fashion means that classical fabric (or finish, or furniture) looks have been forced out, so that race-to-the-bottom Chinese goods can replace them.
now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam. And every wall is “agreeable gray”.
This is also a response to the 1950s:
And 1960s:
Interesting. The top pic is borderline Art Deco.
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Very classy back in the day, très chic.
I cannot decide whether I'd call my parents classy. I don't think they were deficient in that manner but I'm not sure whether they had a lot, either.
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For a while the fashion was shag carpet with a random splotchy pattern in earth tones. Yes, it did a good job of hiding the dirt, but it was too good at that. I can remember hearing the cat throw up in the other room, going in to clean it up and not being able to find it until, after searching for ages, stepping in it.
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They used brown everywhere because all the smoking would have eventually made it brown anyway. If they start there they could pretend nothing was wrong.
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I remember looking at estate agent photos of my parents home when they first bought it back in the 1980s. It looked very much like this. I remember when I was very young they had a carpet with a similar sort of dead plant motif, I remember crawling along and following the plant stems.
That's just how everybody seemed to decorate things back then, people used to wear a lot of brown as well. Perhaps we all depressed or something
My parents had the exact same upholstery as that couch in the living room growing up.
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Then we flipped the script in the 80s, continued in the 90s. Then The Matrix came out and we reinvented black and white clothes, went froggy again.
Ugh, the second link. These goddamn windbreakers... T-T
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They used brown everywhere because all the smoking would have eventually made it brown anyway. If they start there they could pretend nothing was wrong.
Yep my grandmother, and parents had all that shit. And everyone smoked. It was no surprise of 15 years of second hand smoke if I didn't become a smoker too. Now 2025 we are all non smokers. Except for my mother she refuses to give it up.
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I kinda like it, feels cozy
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Bear was sleeping, it was at night. Only pic I have is this, it was not very impressive but it smelled like a bear lived there.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Was it a panda bear or a polar bear?
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Was it a panda bear or a polar bear?
Internet says: "The area's most famous resident is Medvěd Jiří (George the Bear). He is a black and brown Himalayan bear that lives in the enclosures at the castle's base. His appearances are rare, but his entrances are always sure to cause a stir among visitors."
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elimination of wood, cotton, and wool as materials and fast fashion/plastic fashion means that classical fabric (or finish, or furniture) looks have been forced out, so that race-to-the-bottom Chinese goods can replace them.
now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam. And every wall is “agreeable gray”.
This is also a response to the 1950s:
And 1960s:
The other thing about these designs is that people tend to keep stuff for as long as it still works or looks good. So, while the kinds of photos you'd find of a "modern living room" in a magazine in the 1970s would look a certain way:
An actual living room would include furniture and decor from the 1950s and 1960s because it was still fine and didn't need to be replaced yet. IMO the image in this post looks to have a lot of 1960s in it to me.
People think of the 90s as being the era of neon, and while it's true that you might see a neon living room on Miami Vice, most people's living rooms in the 1990s were still orange and brown because the furniture and rugs from the 1970s were still good.
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someone putting carpet in a kitchen must be either looking for a bad time or doesn't give a fuck
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I recently bought a house that had used that '70s paneling as a sort of wainscoting in the kitchen; the panels had been cut to 4' and applied in various ways (everything except just fucking nails) around the base of the walls. It had been painted white so it wasn't quite as hideous as its original state and I didn't feel like replacing it all, but I did have to repair one section of it that had been badly water-damaged. I was surprised to find that Lowe's still has that shit in stock so I bought a piece of it and brought it home ... and discovered that it wasn't really like the original stuff. It looked the same but the grooves between the alleged "boards" were not recessed, they were just printed on the surface, so once it was painted it would have just looked like flat board. So I ended up having to rip that shit into fake planks and nail them up separately with small grooves between them. All that work just to simulate '70s hideousness.
Thank god there was no shag carpet in that house.
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They used brown everywhere because all the smoking would have eventually made it brown anyway. If they start there they could pretend nothing was wrong.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I recently bought a house that had been previously occupied by smokers. During renovation I had something happen that I've never seen before or even heard of. I tried repainting one of the walls without any prep and it seemed like the paint went on fine even a couple of hours later, but when I came back the next morning the paint had all flowed down off the walls onto the floor. As best I can tell, the nicotine and tar on the walls penetrated the partially-dried paint like a solvent and re-liquified it. Fortunately, just wiping the walls down with mineral spirits before painting fixed the problem.
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Wow, I can smell that. Musty basement with a Tyco slot car race track in it.
And a ping pong table with tons of shit stacked on top of it.
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Bring back the '70s babes with it like Joyce DeWitt or Jan Smithers.
Give me Sally Field.
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I’m good with bringing back all of it. Except carpet. Carpet needs stay away.
I used to live in a house that had multiple layers of carpet ... in the bathroom. It was somehow even more disgusting than you would imagine.
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As a young child, that is exactly how I felt about that style. I knew I really hated it. There was no openness to rooms and everything felt drab. It was a style that felt outdated even before I knew what "outdated" even meant.
The smell is the biggest thing I remember. The wood paneling and those types of carpets always had that smell. Well, it was either that smell or the lingering odor of old cigarette smoke and spilled scotch.
By the time I started becoming truly self-aware, the 90's hit and I was awakened with a blast of neon colors. (My brain doesn't want to remember anything much from the late 80's other than my Velcro shoes and jean jacket.)
that smell
They have managed to reproduce that smell in modern times with Febreze.
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elimination of wood, cotton, and wool as materials and fast fashion/plastic fashion means that classical fabric (or finish, or furniture) looks have been forced out, so that race-to-the-bottom Chinese goods can replace them.
now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam. And every wall is “agreeable gray”.
This is also a response to the 1950s:
And 1960s:
now you buy a $1900 couch made of cardboard and foam.
When I was converting my school bus into a motorhome, I acquired (luckily for free) two pieces from one of those massive $4000 sectional couch things. I took them apart to rebuild them in a way that would fit in the bus, and HOLY SHIT are those things made cheaply. No cardboard, but the flat parts were made from leftover bits of chipped OSB, the sloped backs were formed from randomly-applied scraps of that nylon webbing they used to use on folding lawn chairs, and the frame was made from wood that you wouldn't even want to use for firewood. All of this was covered with decent-quality fabric and the cushions and pillows used OK foam, so a normal customer who wasn't deconstructing the thing would never know about the awfulness underneath.
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I'm partial to the 50's. They figured out the sleek Nordic cabinet look early - they just painted everything bright colors.
Mid-century Modern is a style that's still popular for a reason.
