Is Glamour Over?
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Recently, I bought an apartment that will require a complete renovation. Nothing fancy, though it won’t be cheap, and as with such endeavors, I’ve found it’s become an all-consuming project. For instance, I am now fixated on acquiring a vintage Uchiwa pendant lamp made by the midcentury German industrial designer Ingo Maurer. Crafted from bamboo fans, fabric, and paper and resembling the open petals of an anemone flower, the lamp is a beautiful relic of the 1970s. Maurer was called “the poet of light,” and his command of it deserves reverence. Partly because his Uchiwa lamps have not been produced since 1984 and partly because of the frailty of their materials, they are expensive. According to the Parisian dealer I’ve been emailing with, the lamp I want costs more than a year’s worth of childcare for my toddler.
Much of its allure has to do with my having first glimpsed the lamp in the apartment of a New York fashion designer I had long admired. This was many years ago, but the impression it made on me still runs deep. She was throwing a dinner party. There were white anemone flowers on the table, and she had set out her mother’s silver. The designer’s taste was so idiosyncratic and singular that any attempt on my part to imitate it was likely a grave mistake. And yet, the Uchiwa lamp’s beauty took on a possessive quality for me, the way many glamorous objects do. It felt as though my appreciation for it empowered me with a sense of ownership over it.
But as I became familiar with the lamp’s existence, I realized that it had, in recent years, taken on a new dimension. It often appeared in the bland homes of wealthy people. Unlike the apartment of the quirky fashion designer, these interiors were conventionally tasteful and carefully considered. Which isn’t always a good thing. As the late critic Dave Hickey once wrote: “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.”
What had become of glamour? Of the way an object (or a dress or a room) can create a beguiling sense of sophistication and worldliness that makes us believe that simply by being in its presence, we’ve been elevated out of the tedium of everyday life? Glamour had become almost moribund in its consistency. Every wealthy home looked like everybody else’s wealthy home—Instagram-ready, with Ettore Sottsass mirrors and Pierre Jeanneret chairs and Ginori china and Japanese coffee kettles. I was reminded of the time I worked for a billionaire whose townhouse was filled with original pieces by Claude Lalanne and Charlotte Perriand. She complained to me of the musty smell of her Pierre Paulin sofa. Hadn’t that been part of its appeal? No. I soon discovered that for her, its worth was in its connection to the past, in its ability to telegraph exclusivity and rarefied taste. While working for her, I got the sense that it was boring being so extraordinarily rich. With money, no gratification was left unsated. Collecting hard-to-find, one-of-a-kind antiques offered an escape, however temporary, from the ennui.
I’ve long suspected that we live in a moment that is a little too enamored with the past. As W. David Marx writes in his 2022 book Status and Culture, the internet has made it harder for the cool things to stay cool. “Retromania,” as Marx labels it, reveals our exhaustion with the endless cycle of the new that our hyperconnected age produces. It’s all too easy to figure out—with a scroll through Pinterest or a quick search on 1stDibs—what that 1960s cocktail table is called, who designed it, where to buy it, and for how much. The past is too accessible, which, in turn, destroys whatever opportunities we have to create in the present. Marx quotes the literary critic Harold Bloom, who wrote that “strong poets keep returning from the dead....How they return is the decisive matter, for if they return intact, then the return impoverishes the later poets, dooming them to be remembered—if at all—as having ended in poverty, in an imaginative need they could not themselves gratify.”
The luxury market has also changed radically. Too many objects are mass-produced and mass-marketed. What we’re mostly paying for these days is a brand or a logo and rarely much else, something Dana Thomas explored in her 2008 book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster.
So we revel in the past. We worship craftsmanship. We elevate the creator. We cling to nostalgia. I’m sure if I could afford an Uchiwa, I would still buy one. But I was able to let it go once I recognized what was behind my own obsession. I, too, wanted something that felt touched by history. That seemed as though I had discovered it and not stumbled onto it after a late night flipping through the internet on my phone. People have long filled their homes with antiques. But beauty—like glamour—is defined by more than just nostalgia. As I continue my hunt for the right lamp, I’m curious to see how much my affection for both can detach from the past. For now, my new apartment’s dining room holds a sense of possibility. Whatever I end up choosing will ultimately come with its own narrative, one that bridges the distance between the past and present in ways I won’t fully know until it’s there, an object firmly embedded in the texture of my life.
This story originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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