… this photo in the New York Times, part of an ad campaign for Parachute, an upscale bedding company. (There’s a Parachute store a thirteen-minute walk from La Kid’s trendy DC apartment.) What strikes me is the dirt on the bedroom floor, and on the pants of the person troweling.
In the bedroom. Troweling in the bedroom.
Other elements of the image – washed-out whites, distressed terracottas, and palely flowering plants – are familiar from the hyper-minimalist, organic design world, and UD herself is a paid-up member of that world… Often, when UD visits her neighbors’ houses, she thinks They put everything in. I take everything out…
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Mr UD is fond of this guy… something of a crackpot … named Bede Griffiths, who just kept getting more and more and more ascetic in his spiritual life, and for sure that ain’t me. Like only wearing a loincloth and sleeping under the stars. But I recognize myself, somewhat, in this pallid pictorial. Remember that Mr UD’s father was a noted Corbusierian, so there’s that influence in our (midcentury) house, and its simple pollinator gardens/unrefined forests, as well. We’re definitely on the spectrum.
Anyway, there’s above all the devil-may-care, so-what-if-I’m wearing-white-slacks thing to note in this image. I get the whole bringing the garden indoors trend, but wow. Does this woman not have a cat/dog to gambol in the loam and track it all over the house? Or am I supposed to be too cool to worry about that? Is it bourgeois to worry about that? Croyez-moi, I don’t care when stuff in the house gets dirty and dog-haired, etc.; but I’m thinking I draw the line at potting plants on my bedroom floor.
May 22nd, 2022 at 7:53AM
This is definitely an epater les bourgeois picture. See, I’m so rich that I will have someone else clean up the mess. I’m so rich I don’t even notice the mess I’m making.
May 22nd, 2022 at 10:28AM
EB: Yes, yes, and yes. But because she’s a beautiful innocent tender shoot and not an ugly cynical fifty year old hedge fund manager — that is, because the source of her devil may care massive wealth is obscure — and because no show-off fund manager would in any case ever allow a molecule of dirt into the house — the cultural identity of this young woman remains a bit obscure. If we say super-rich, slightly loopy, bohemian — Helena Bonham Carter; Gwyneth Paltrow — that leaves a marketing question open, since this is a very small segment of the population…
May 23rd, 2022 at 7:09AM
Yes. And she also comes off as somewhat childish. You expect two-year olds to be this oblivious to the effects of their fun.